CloneFic Part 3
by Phantom Bard
Summary: Sequel to CloneFic Pt 2. The clones of X&G find an ancient enemy in the modern world. Tragedy drives Xena to war as the Destroyer of Nations. May the gods have mercy on the mortal world. (Story is complete in 12 chapters. Don't be scared 'cause it's long)
1. Default Chapter

Clonefic

Part 3 Chapter 1

By Phantom Bard

**Disclaimer:** This is a work of fan fiction, and is offered for non-profit entertainment only. It may not be sold, may be downloaded for personal use only, and must contain this statement. Some characters, concepts, and backstory from the TV series, Xena Warrior Princess, are the properties of MCA/Universal and Renaissance Pictures/Studios USA, or whatever entity currently owns their rights. In particular, the clones from the 6th season episode _"Send in the Clones"_ are involvedNo malice is intended towards these characters or concepts. The contest version of Clonefic Part 1 was posted in the Clonefic Writing Contest at in Feb. 2003. This is the continuation, Part 3. Readers may notice "outtakes" from other films. Those characters, concepts, and backstory are the property of their creators and/or the holders of their copyrights.

**Warnings: **This story depicts Xena and Gabrielle's relationship as non-graphic alternate. Also included are violence, references to physical suffering, emotional trauma, and cultural displacement. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 are mentioned. It is recommended that the reader first complete "Clonefic Pt. 1 (Revised Version)" and "Clonefic Part 2". This content includes spoilers.

_**Preface**_

Having been recreated and set adrift in the modern world, the clones of Xena and Gabrielle were still the products of their age. They were creatures of the 1st century BC, not the 21st century AD. The core of their beliefs, morals, and expectations adhered to the time of their original lives, and all these things had more validity in the present than anyone in modern times would have believed. Though the trappings of society had changed, some realities from the ancient world had persisted. In the clash between the ancient world and the new, there existed the possibility for a recapitulation of a time line that had been avoided long ago. Now the combination of modern technology, the clones' existence, and the traumatic experiences to which they had been subjected made that alternate reality viable again. An ancient cause of strife would lead to a confrontation that would seek its resolution in a battle on contemporary soil.

Heroism on TV is often depicted as a struggle between good and evil, with positions clearly demarcated and conflict resolved according to some Greater Good whose values are concrete, eternal, and universal. In the real world, resolving conflict is more often a choice favoring the lesser of two evils. Idealism becomes theoretical while pragmatism demands compromise. The results form something more like a patch than a cure, and eventually the underlying wound festers and demands attention anew. Then an expedient solution is again applied, dictated by the prevailing beliefs or the exercise of power, and the cycle continues. TV heroes and TV dramas are more satisfying to the soul. The symbolism of conflict is simplified and the characters remain recognizable types, serving as models of inspiration for the real world. It has ever been so. Aesop's Fables, Biblical Parables, and the mythology and literature of every culture reflect those societies' values, and act as tools of acculturation.

The clones of Xena and Gabrielle, trapped in a strange modern world, found themselves faced with resolving an ancient conflict. Though they weren't the heroes TV had made them out to be, they were forced to become the heroes they had always been. They fought for a compromise guided by the Greater Good and accepted the self-sacrifices it entailed. This is the story of how a pair of heroes who should never have been saved a world that never was, and preserved the world that is from becoming a world that could have been, once upon a time, long, long ago.

_Come to me at twilight when the shadows fill the shade,_

_Caressing all the world with night so gently day to fade._

_Then gift me O my goddess, with a song for every age,_

_And let me sing it truthfully upon this mortal stage._

_I'll tell of things to shape our world in centuries to come,_

_When men shall fly, the earth unite, and speak with anyone._

_They crafted like Hephaestos, and in hubris knew no shame,_

_Until they raised an ancient curse, the long lost Hellenes' Bane._

_Lament the fate of future days in Wisdom's power snared,_

_Both mortal and immortal caught, by Science none were spared._

_She germinated unseen plots, waged wisdom's frontless war,_

_Unseen and unsuspected, ever lurking at its core._

_Come to me in darkness where Persephone is blind,_

_Interring all the world with night that's deeper than a mine._

_Then into hidden places where discoveries are made,_

_Await such scenes of horror to make a mortal conscience fade. _

_I'll sing to you of motherhood frustrated yet again,_

_A daughter slain, a sacred pyre, an oath of blood begins._

_And then upon a heartbeat, yet a greater blow was borne,_

_A pair entwined was sundered and from love heart was shorn._

_Lament the souls of ancients ground 'neath battle's heated steel,_

_When Cupid's flush was sacrificed and broken on the wheel._

_Now heart of fire to heart of ice, a living heart to mourn,_

_Oh, Phobos, Deimos, Nemesis, your equal has been born._

_(Verses 1 and 3 from _"The Lay of the Conqueror", _author unknown, circa 42 BC)_

November 8, 2001 – Columbia, South Carolina 

It was the terminal hour of a nocturnal disaster, and appropriately, it proceeded an unwelcome dawn. By the wavering saffron light of a torch, the dismal night awaited its euthanasia by Eos, the inevitable harbinger of Helios. It would be a mercy killing of sorts, though today neither deity was welcome. Fittingly, it was the dark of the moon; Hekate's night...a good night for a funeral.

Through the dregs of the darkness came the soft ominous thunk of logs methodically being stacked. The slow hollow rhythm had measured the passage of time like a funerary metronome, as though sounding out the dying night's pulse in the peaceful suburban Columbia backyard.

The late hour's stillness and the flickering torch wafting its oily black smoke brought a timeless atmosphere to the small clearing under the boles of the ancient sentinel trees. The scene would have seemed familiar to the Macedonian Amazons of the 1st century BC. Perhaps their sympathetic ghosts even stood vigil among the shadows, called forth from their eternal rest to witness the somber doings of their old friends. But then, from beyond the property lines came the sounds of 21st century civilization; the groaning complaint of a garbage truck on a distant street, the whispered roar of a jet somewhere overhead, and the muffled whine of a motorcycle on SR-66, across the Broad River. Combined with the ambient glow of the city's streetlights reflecting off the irregular clouds, the sounds were sufficient to crush any temporal illusions and herald the present century. And yet, above the late autumn's ragged canopy of withered leaves, the morning star twinkled its fading light as it always had.

Within the clearing, the two women in black battle dress uniforms were the only living souls. One, a tall brunette, knelt beside a shrouded body whose soul had never been present. The other, a compact blonde, moved wearily about her duties. The activities of these two women were more appropriate to that time long past than they were to the modern world. With but a change of costume, a little faith, and the willing suspension of disbelief, the scene might have been set sometime in the failing years of the Roman Republic. The tableau was all too familiar in these women's memories, for they had "been there, done that". Although they lived in the 21st century now, they had grown up and lived their adult lives in the time of Julius Caesar. They saw their present through the memories of lives lived long ago, for the contemporary disturbances barely impinged through the surrounding sylvan acreage that had once been the core of the old Pappas plantation.

_(As Alexander Williams had discovered, the Pappas family had owned the property since the 1690s, when it had been acquired from the proprietors of King Charles I's original land grant that had created Carolina in 1629._ _For 175 years, the Pappas family had planted mostly cotton and tobacco, and they had owned slaves. It had been an economic necessity of their way of life, as well as a legal and socially accepted tradition._

_Like most landowners, they had lived on the land with their slaves; from the start they had never been absentee masters. Unlike many landowners, especially the coastal rice planters further to the east, the Pappas family had treated their people relatively well. It started with having 180 laborers rather than the minimum of 70 that were necessary to work the land, and those numbers had allowed for much more humane working conditions. Later, although the Pappas' were no longer British subjects when England abolished its Trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808, the slaves found themselves being treated better. While Sherman Ezekiel Pappas' son William didn't emancipate his slaves, he did try to accord them a measure of respect beyond New World traditions and United States law. On the Pappas' plantation the slaves choose their overseers from among their own people, and their marriages and families were recognized and never split up._

_Theirs was the only plantation where the Africans had real cottages to live in, not shotgun shacks or huts. These sat on land set aside specifically for them and held in their names even though they couldn't legally own it, for having been accorded the status of property themselves, the Negroes couldn't own property. Still, the slaves eventually built their own Baptist church, a school, and worked plots of land where they grew food crops for themselves. They enjoyed fare far better than the corn meal and fatty pork that were the more standard slave rations. Perhaps most incredibly, the Pappas heirs allowed the slaves to try offenses among themselves in their own court. In the crown's colony and later State of South Carolina, the newly American English descendants of ancient Greeks had encouraged the stolen sons and daughters of Africa to learn the rudiments of democracy, stilted and perverted though it was. On the Pappas plantation, slave deaths from exhaustion or chronic starvation, scars from the lash and the branding iron, and slave suicides and uprisings were unknown. Ironically, the Pappas' treated their slaves much more like the majority of ancient Greeks had, rather than as their American contemporaries did. It finally came to an end in 1865._

_When Lincoln's emancipation had been enacted, each slave had been granted his or her freedom without rancor. They'd also been offered continued employment at a fair wage, but beyond that, the deeds to their parcels of land had finally been transferred legally to their names. After as much as six generations, they owned their own village adjacent to the plantation. Some of them left, most of those being freedmen who could read, write, and practice a trade, and these often sold their land to those who chose to stay. Over time, the ex-slave's village had become a comfortable suburban Columbia neighborhood._

_In the century after Appomattox, the Pappas plantation had weathered many rounds of reorganization. By the end of the 19th century the family's wealth had ceased to be based on agriculture. By the mid-20th century, most of the original land had been sold off, leaving a parcel of 80 acres, mostly lying within the Columbia city limits. The 1890's guesthouse that the soulmates called home, sat at the head of a neck of land, which protruded into a suburban neighborhood from the bulk of the property, on which sat the original 1750's Pappas mansion, now a historic landmark site. Within the boundaries of the park-like estate there existed sufficient privacy to conduct a cremation._

_The soulmates had discovered the clearing almost a year before. It had once been used for historic reenactments that included a bonfire and dancing slaves, but PC culture and budget cuts had put an end to the activities in the 1980s. The remnants of the firepit and the leftover cordwood were obviously indicative of a funeral site, easily recognizable to the clones from their original lives. They had found it sad and comforting.) Editor_

During the preceding hour of darkness, cloned Gabrielle had carefully stacked a cord of poplar and locust to build Eve's pyre. She was still moving with a fatigued efficiency, a morose shadow in the black BDU she still wore from the raid. Her partner had lapsed into a brooding silence hours before, and hadn't risen from where she'd knelt beside the cadaver of her daughter since they'd entered the clearing at a little after 5:00 am.

The blonde had laid the seasoned timbers unassisted, in the traditional manner of the Greek Amazons; four tiers high and cunningly arranged so as to create an updraft that would eventually cause the pyre to collapse inward. The logs graduated in size, from small on the inside to large on the outside. #2 fuel oil would soak the narrower core timbers, and its runoff would be ignited where it seeped to the outside of the thicker logs at ground level. The deceased would be swallowed by the flames, honored within a heart of fire where her soul would be liberated, but equally important for a warrior, her body would be rendered inviolable by her enemies. Eve's corpse would never become a trophy.

Gabrielle placed the last of the wood, producing another hollow clunk; a sound that she felt mirrored the emptiness, the vacancy of life, in the body they had come to honor. The cloned bard stared at the finished pyre, and let her mind wander for a few moments as she raised a hand to her mouth and gnawed at an annoying splinter in her palm.

The deceased, (and here the clone wondered if one could truly be deceased if they had never been alive), was both achingly familiar and surprisingly alien. Gabrielle had known Eve's original self and had regarded her as a second daughter, but the body to be immolated at dawn had never known the breath of life. The bard had never seen her before finding her dead earlier that night in a secret cloning lab in Georgia. When she was honest with herself, the blonde knew that she didn't feel the same heartrending loss that she'd felt when Xena's original daughter had been kidnapped in 58 BC. Though physically identical to her soulmate's daughter, the bard couldn't really think of her clone as such. Eve's soul, her heart, the essence of what had once made her the cruel, irritating, and eventually beloved person Gabrielle had known, had never existed in this time. Eve had never existed in the 21st century. It wasn't the same, the bard decided, not nearly.

After finally succeeding with her crude surgery, Gabrielle spat out the splinter that she'd teased from her palm with her teeth. Then she absently reached into one of her many pockets and retrieved a malted milk ball. She popped it into her mouth to help her think.

So, Gabrielle pondered, waxing philosophical, had this clone of Xena's daughter ever had a soul? Was she just an empty body recreated from a stolen cell? And to what extent could she ever have been her soulmate's reborn second child? She'd died before she'd ever had a chance, any chance, like the one that she and Xena had been given, despite the mixed blessing that their present lives had been. Though her programming had indicated that she was to be the recreation of Livia, once long ago the Champion of Caesar's Rome had reclaimed her identity as Eve. It could have happened again, here in the 21st century, had she lived to confront the possibility. Gabrielle believed this without a doubt. But instead, the dead clone never had a chance to make the choice.

Gabrielle could only damn the new god that Alti had mentioned...Science. The Fates weren't without blame either, she noted with a touch of resentment. Their warped sense of purpose had repeatedly been evident in the recreated soulmates' current lives. Eve's clone had died because their assault on the clandestine lab had cut the power to her life support machines. The blonde sadly regarded the finished arrangement of logs as she dusted off her hands. With a sigh, she flexed her stiffening back under the shoulder harness that carried her twin short swords, and turned to look at her partner.

Xena was still kneeling a dozen paces away, beside her daughter's shrouded cadaver. Gabrielle doubted if she'd moved in the last hour, and she'd been silent most of the night. After her first heartbroken scream, she'd barely uttered a word since discovering the body. For the cloned warrior, words weren't really necessary, but Xena had made two initial statements. "_First my daughter will have a warrior's pyre," _the Warrior Princess had stated in a deathly calm,_ "and then I will have my revenge."_

What had followed was more disturbing. Though it hadn't been declared formally, written out and signed in blood, her next statement had been the equivalent of an oath of war. _"I will find them and I will kill them all."_ The words had been spoken before four warriors, Gabrielle herself, Harry Tasker, Albert Gibson, and Ethan Hunt. Three would have provided sufficient witness to a binding oath of vengeance among the Amazons. Thereafter, Xena had fallen silent.

The three covert operatives that had shepherded the soulmates on the mission to destroy the cloning lab in Georgia had understood the cause of Xena's sorrow, but they hadn't perceived the true meaning of her silence. What they'd interpreted as mourning had been recognizable to the cloned bard as something darker. She alone had seen this reaction before, and though Xena held her heart and half her soul, Gabrielle was beyond worried. The blonde had taken one chilling look into her beloved's eyes and had seen that the distillate of all the warrior's anger had become focused with single-minded intensity. She chomped on another malted milk ball without really tasting it.

In their original lives, a similar oath had led to a dozen bloody years and 86,000 Roman dead...and the eventual return of Eve to her mother. Yet that oath, the _Sacramentum Bellicus_ that Xena had declared before the rulers of the Amazon Nation in 58 BC, had claimed the return of her daughter as its central goal. Now, in their recreated lives, it was too late for Eve. There would be no rescue in this era that would satisfy Xena's oath. Worse, the soulmates weren't even sure of exactly who their enemies were, or how high the chain of responsible "thems" rose.

The original Xena had been 38 when she'd declared war on the Roman Empire, but today, her clone was 26. Before she reached the age at which her original self had died, she could unleash over a quarter-century of mayhem. Extrapolation predicted 172,000 potential casualties, but this time Xena's oath was open-ended. Its goal was vengeance. The killing could go on and on with no volume of blood sufficient to appease it.

As in the past, the commencement of the oath that Xena had uttered was only a matter of time. Gabrielle knew that below her partner's silence lay a layer of sorrow as deep as the Aegean, but below that rested the bedrock of a terrifying wrath. Underpinning the heartbreak of a mother who'd lost a child that she hadn't even known existed, to a death that she blamed herself for, there seethed the volcanic rage of the Destroyer of Nations.

Even before discovering Eve's body, Xena had been indulging her darker tendencies. During their battle with the clones of Callisto and Mavican, flashes of the Destroyer had illuminated a combat that had left the Cirran's left hand almost severed from her body. Gabrielle realized that it would take a monumental effort to get her soulmate back to "normal", since everything about their present lives had been so very abnormal.

Cloned Xena had never been enamoured of the 21st century, believing it to be a time that was violently out of control; almost a lost cause that she'd felt no responsibilities to. She'd never asked to be here and didn't really belong. Xena had only begun to feel a kinship to a limited number of the living. Then the tragedy of September 11th had struck, and cloned versions of their ancient enemies had appeared. The Warrior Princess had reacted to that meddling by Fate's hand with decisive force. It was the cloned warrior's attempt to cauterize a wound that had festered since their first experiences in this lifetime, at the hands of their creator, Alti.

When she thought about it, the bard realized that so much of what had happened since their recreation had acted to drive her soulmate towards her darkest inclinations. Alti be damned; the Fates had taken up where the "Blood Shamaness" had left off, potentially reviving the Evil Xena at her worst. Gabrielle patted down her pockets and found the box of Cinnamon Altoids, and then popped one of the hot candies into her mouth. For a moment the blonde clone wondered what would go wrong next.

As if on cue a blue light flared in the quiet clearing, shattering the darkness with a harsh staccato of blinding flashes and leaping shadows. The effect was always so much more intense at night than in the light of day. Gabrielle's eyes instinctively snapped closed against the glare. When she reopened them, she couldn't stifle a groan. The person of the God of War was standing behind her soulmate. The blonde clone's level of concern leaped to a new peak of foreboding.

Oh perfect, she thought, just the person Xena needs around to egg her on when she's ready to go to war. Serves you right for wondering, doesn't it? She chastised herself.

Ares turned his head as he knelt beside Xena, sparing Gabrielle a warning glance.

_Keep your distance and hold your tongue!_

She heard his voice clearly dictate the command in her head. The words were accompanied by a pressure inside her skull not unlike a headache. For a moment her mouth hung open in shock, the pink candy disc scorching a cinnamon spot on her tongue before her jaw snapped closed. She nodded and stood her ground.

The bard had seen Ares angry or frustrated, but strangely, she had never really feared him. More often she'd seen him as a confidant and advisor to her soulmate; wry and witty, and despite his enormous ego, indulgent, like a parent with a headstrong and mildly irritating child. Gabrielle had seen Xena argue with him, though not in the blatantly disrespectful manner depicted on the TV show. She'd argued with him herself when he was in a more personable mood...when he seemed above the mortal tribulations of their daily world. She knew Ares regarded her as a sidekick; a more than competent warrior, yes, but never worthy of his deepest consideration. He had always suffered her attachment to Xena, and in so much as a mortal could ever challenge him, he'd found her vexing. Still, Ares had always been cordial to her, and if a bit snide in his remarks, she knew they were meant to tease not damn her. She took them almost as a form of sibling rivalry. His advice had saved her life more than once, and she knew that at times she had received his patronage.

_(As a warrior, Ares was Gabrielle's patron god, just as Artemis was her patron goddess as an Amazon, and the Muses inspired her bardic activities. During her original life, Gabrielle had had occasion to thank them all for her blessings, just as anyone of her time would. Of all the Olympians though, it was Ares with whom she'd had the most contact...not surprising, considering who her partner was.) Editor_

There was nothing playful about him now. The words in her head had been nothing less than a direct command from a very powerful god. It had been something unexpected, yes, but also something that no mortal of her background would have disobeyed. She froze, almost as much from the shock of receiving the command at all as from its content. Tonight Ares was beyond the anger he had displayed in their school on September 12th. Gabrielle realized that he was seething...something she'd never seen before, and she had to wonder why. It actually scared her. Xena had turned her head just enough to face him, but the rest of her body remained frozen. The bard overheard their terse whispered conversation.

"You have my sympathy, Favorite," Ares softly told the cloned warrior. After a pause he added, "I was occupied so I didn't know...and you couldn't have. Don't blame yourself, Xena. Lay the blame where it has been earned. If you want it, you have my Blessing."

"Thank you."

"For what it's worth, I'm sorry," the dark god whispered, leaning in a fraction to let his breath brush Xena's midnight hair, "war is so much different from what I once knew...from what we once knew. It seems that now we both need to embrace the present and look to the future."

The God of War raised a hand and made a motion as if to cup the back of Xena's head, but stopped just shy of contact. In reaction, Xena's eyes slipped closed as the vision of a possible future appeared to her mind's eye. Ares concentrated on imparting what he had learned since hearing her scream. Events had gotten out of hand, yet he would still try to honor the constraints on a god's actions.

_Anthracite hair shifted in a slight breeze, while eyes as heartless as chips of flint cut through the predawn stillness where the coming morning's moisture thickened the air and offered the land a carpet of dew. Selene's disc had set and Phosphor's star was fading. As promised, the weeklong overcast had broken up in the last candlemarks. The dawn would be clear. She waited, mantled in the stillness of discipline, but not at peace. Nations had fallen and half a world lay in flaming rubble. The survivors would enter a second Dark Age in servitude, their machinery silenced. Yet true silence could no more exist here than could the darkness of true night. It was too late for either now. In moments Eos would taint the horizon behind her, heralding Apollo's light as a clarion of battle. It would be a lovely day for a bloodbath._

_Before her a narrow plain lay under the failing darkness, cleared and groomed as a field of battle. Facing her across that scant eighth mile of land, a hostile army of 24,000 soldiers waited. These enemies had been bred, armed, and inspired by a leader of inhuman ability, and yet she had already driven them to their present disadvantageous position, encamped on the soggy margins of a swamp and facing uphill against her from the west. She had left them to steep in that demoralizing environment for the past week._

_With supremely acute hearing she marked the faint rush of air as it flowed in and out of their lungs. It was an ocean of rhythmic whispers, like waves lapping against distant shores, or the even more distant impressions, fainter to her mind than memories, of her mother's breath while she'd still rested in her womb. Over the intervening furlong, the slightest of breezes conveyed a fractional degree's warmth from their collective body heat to caress her skin, almost as an offering of their mortality. They were so close._

_A glance to her right revealed a sheer cliff face rising four hundred feet in an imposing verticality of schist and gneiss, a magmatic darkness recalling its origin in Hades' realm. Born of earth's fire, the black rock was a fitting ally, a lithic equivalent of her unbending will and enduring darkness. Now its igneous hardness reflected sounds to her ears, and later it would simplify the battle. No troop movements would come from the right flank today, and there would be no escape up that escarpment for the vanquished._

_From somewhere on her left came the shuffling of many hooves, horses softly chuffing, an occasional snort, and the scents of harness leather, the animals, and their dung. She marked them clearly in her mind's eye; _hippikon _cavalry...2,000 waiting to crash against her left flank. With the foresight of a veteran general, she visualized the rear ranks of her enemies marching to follow the cavalry charge after the infantry lines engaged, hoping to mop up her shattered files. A good plan, she mused, but futile. The fallow field they would trample during their attack lay crisscrossed with thorn vines and netting and undermined by camouflaged trenches filled with wicked spikes whose points were poisoned with botanic toxins. No troop movements would come from the left flank today, and the vanquished there would be reduced to broken bodies and rent flesh. _

_The enemy outnumbered her forces by over three to one. They were far too numerous for stealth, yet far too few for victory._ _ In a forgotten world, they would have comprised four Imperial Legions, complete with cavalry wings. No one could hide an army of that size in such a small space. No one could prevail against her fielding a conventional army within an order of magnitude of her own army's count._

_Those soldiers across the plain were her enemies today; doomed soldiers who waited to fight and die as Apollo's chariot rode up into the sky. With a soul as cold as her pale blue eyes, she had no mercy to offer them. They had been bred to fight and they would be slaughtered to a man, exterminated utterly, leaving not even a memory worthy of tales or song. On this day their mortal souls would be rendered unto Hades' judgment, and their immortal general would die at her hand. This she had sworn. For a moment she wondered how a god would judge a god, and the thought brought a slight curl to her lips._

_Now she turned and cast her gaze back upon her own army. There stood almost 8,000 warriors at parade rest, with hands clasped behind their backs and their feet set shoulder width apart. Their formation was 4,000 across to match the enemy's line, but only two ranks deep against the enemy's six. For this engagement they were equipped as _euzonos_, light infantry, each clad head to toe in black body armor woven of manmade spider silk and overlain with cyber-mimetic fabric. On their left collars, the Sigil of War was emblazoned in blood red; on their right shoulders, the Lion of Amphipolis was embroidered in gold._

_In all the history of armed conflict, never had any general fielded an army so cohesive, so committed, or so deadly. She knew every fighter as intimately as she knew herself; she knew their abilities, their courage, and the uncompromising perfection of their training. Menace projected from them like a storm front, these fell and peerless fighters. They held every edge their general could give them save numbers, and today that would count for nothing, for they had the advantages of heredity, technology, and destiny._

_In contrast to the army across the plain, her army was deathly silent. They stood frozen, bodies that metabolized at 42% greater than an average mortal barely breathing, without any nervous movements or even the slightest evidence of any diminution of their focus. These warriors mirrored their commander in every aspect. Each cast her cold eyes on their opposition, identical neutral expressions on their faces, and each stood as tall as the next. She was more than a _strategos hypatos_, a supreme commander, to them. She was the mother of them all. A finger absentmindedly stroked the patch on her arm where the cells had been harvested less than five years before. She had forged this army with the aid of her patron god, and with it she would conquer on this day...and on every day to come. She would defeat the immortal enemy leader and her army before Apollo reached the zenith. She would put an end to the rapaciousness of Science. Finally, after all the intervening years, she would change the world. It had been foreseen and she believed._

_Beside her a tall figure flashed into her presence and gave her an unabashed look of approval. His Favorite. He leaned in and gave her a quick kiss on the lips, symbolic of his Blessing, and then he vanished in a flash of blue light. In his wake she fingered the razor sharp ring at her waist...the Chakram of Day...the only unbroken, uncombined chakram left in existence. It was as deadly now as it had been on that long forgotten morning when Hephaestos had first forged it. It was as deadly to a goddess as to a titan._

_At last the long awaited dawn broke the horizon. Eos painted the landscape in hues of blood while sending greedy tendrils lashing like rents across the sky. From the plain below a trumpet bravely sent up the call to battle, yet on this morning it sounded plaintive and doomed. In answer, the tramping of boots in perfect synchronization split the stillness, announcing the enemy's advance. _

_The barest hint of a grin shaped her lips and the fire blossomed in her eyes as she felt the killer within unleashed. She saw it mirrored in the eyes of the 8,000 facing her, their faces now shadowed by the light of the dawn brightening behind them. Then Apollo's chariot cleared the horizon, backing her forces with his radiant disc, as if conferring his blessing too on her campaign._

_The enemy came on, closing the distance against the blinding morning glare, and she let them come, awaiting them with her troops, still as the memorial statues of ancient heroes graven in stone. They had advanced to within a 100 yards of her now; scarcely 60 seconds' march away. Again their trumpet sounded, and with a shout, the 8,000 spears of their _hoplite _front ranks snapped from vertical to horizontal. Their shields lapped in a barrier wall of bronze. From the ranks behind them, 16,000 swords hissed from their scabbards with a demon's proud roar._

_In answer, she raised her right hand, clad in black woven armor. Her 8,000 warriors snapped to attention, the stamp as they set their boots side-by-side resounding sharp as a clap of thunder. She clenched her fist. Each warrior reached up and lowered a single goggle-like filter over her left eye, enhancing their vision into the infrared. _

_Before her eyes and the eyes of her enemies, her army, 8,000 cloned warriors, each tall and obsidian haired, each bearing a _spathe makra_, (long sword), _xiphidion_, (a dagger), and a circular blade, shimmered and disappeared from mortal sight as if at the waking from a dream._

_Then she turned and strode forward to meet the enemy line. For all appearances she was one against an army, yet it was the army whose advance faltered. Behind her the ground shook as her invisible forces followed, their every boot fall striking a tremor in synch with her own. She drew her sword and 8,000 swords shrieked from their scabbards in response. She'd heard the gasps from the enemy soldiers as her warriors had vanished, leaving the barren hill empty under the rising sun, its surface undulating slightly as if overlain by a rippling wave of heat. Hidden in the hill's long morning shadow, the shadows of her warriors could not be seen. Answering their adversaries' sounds of dismay came a full-throated challenge from her invisible army._

"_In the name of the Destroyer of Nations! With the Blessing of the God of War!"_

_And before she lowered her filter and disappeared from living sight, she cried out a single command, "Kill 'Em All!"_

_Two heartbeats passed and then an aggregate warbling whine louder than a jet engine lacerated the morning as 8,000 chakrams cut the air... and the enemy's front rank fell. _

"Ask yourself, what is Science?" A flash of blue lightning, and he was gone.

At its core, beneath all the boiling pits of brimstone and the mansions of naphtha fire, the heart of Tartarus was ice. So too was a human heart inflamed by fulminating anger. Beyond the heat of passion lay the frost of a soul struck frigid with grief. Gabrielle knew this intimately from long years of experience. She had seen the silent tears that the Warrior Princess had shed in her initial shock give way to the cold grimness of rage.

Xena's rage was a force that existed far out of its proper time and place. It was a rage from the ancient world of hand-to-hand combat, of blood spilled on shining blades with brutal disregard, in civilizations veneered gossamer thin over barbarism. In Xena's time, the grandeur of Mycenae lay over 1,200 years in the past, the power of the Delian and Peloponnesian Leagues had failed, and Rome was conquering the piecemeal remnants of Alexander's empire. What we now know as Greece truly was a land in turmoil. In that time, the ever-present threats to life, liberty, and personal dignity could only be defended against, outside the security of a city's walls, with bitter steel and fighting prowess.

Xena's prowess had been born in that time of relative lawlessness; a time of warlords, petty tyrants, and bullying local councils, all overlaid by the acquisitiveness of Rome. It had been forged in battle during her years as a warlord, when many of her own soldiers would have turned on her for an obol. Yet Xena had been a survivor, if something less than a prodigy, even in the beginning.

At 17 she'd led the defense of her home city of Amphipolis and had somehow beaten the warlord Cortese, with a force composed of ignorant farmers, shepherds, and slaves. In those bloody candlemarks, Xena had first tasted the exhilaration of bloodshed, and it had fed something deep within her. She hadn't been brilliant that day, just overwhelmingly violent, and Cortese had been appallingly inept. It had been a Phyrric victory though, for afterwards over half the defenders she'd inflamed with her rhetoric lay dead in the streets. Seeking a scapegoat for their sorrow, the ungrateful survivors had soon blamed her. Shouting that another such victory would ruin them, they'd driven her into exile with a hail of stones. Xena had left in disgust, seeking trouble. It was the spring of 80 BC.

That time period had encompassed the opening years of the Mithridatic Wars, as Rome expanded its empire eastwards, south of the Black Sea. The brutal and brilliant King Mithridates VI of Pontus had forged a confederacy of states in the new Roman Province of Asia Minor. In 88 BC the population had risen up at his command, and in a coordinated attack, they'd slaughtered over 80,000 Italians throughout the province on a single day. His ultimate goal was nothing less than the destruction of the Roman Republic. In the early summer of 80 BC, Xena had begun her apprenticeship in warcraft with Mithridates' army, which had overrun Thrace on its way to attack Italia. Xena was willing to serve, for like most Thracians, the angry teen had no love of Rome, even before she'd met Julius Caesar.

The King of Pontus was a master tactician, and the most knowledgeable man of his time with poisons and chemical weapons. Mithridates could also speak close to two dozen languages, a tactical advantage which allowed him to converse directly with envoys from Britannia to Indus. He could be creative, inspiring, and magnanimous, but also paranoid and ruthless. King Mithridates had executed the Roman Legatus Marius Aquillius by pouring molten gold down his throat; a suitable reward for his having initially instigated the war in hopes of sharing in the plunder of Pontus. Aquillius had quickly succumbed to acute heartburn. The method of execution had also addressed the crimes of Marius' father, Consul Manius Aquillius, who had poisoned the water sources of several Asian cities during a revolt in 129 BC.

The king's paranoia led him to believe that he was in constant jeopardy of being poisoned, and so he subscribed to a regimen of homeopathy, ingesting a cocktail containing traces of every poison he knew, in order to prod his body to develop a natural immunity to the toxins. According to ancient reports, his conditioning had been successful, for later he was unable to commit suicide with poison. To escape capture by the Romans, he was forced to fall on a sword.

King Mithridates had quickly recognized Xena's value, first as a skirmisher in the lines, and later as a lieutenant. She had the spark of inspiration, and perhaps even a destiny. Two seasons after meeting her, he became a mentor to the violent girl from Thrace. In those days the king enjoyed the patronage of the God of War, and the god always had his eyes on the king's army. He would watch and wait as the years proved the young lieutenant's measure.

Xena learned, absorbing the king's lessons like a sea sponge. It was from Mithridates that Xena acquired her basic martial skills, along with the ambitiousness that ruled her for many years. In any case, he taught her the uses of external resources, the exoteric military science of the times. It would fall to Lao Ma and the mages of Indus to teach her the subtler inner resources many years later. In the meantime, Xena began learning the first of over thirty languages she would eventually speak. She also seemed to have picked up something of King Mithridates' dark sense of humor.

During her first 2 years after leaving Amphipolis, Xena learned by doing and became a warrior. It was astonishing that she hadn't been killed in the process. Perhaps it had been the unsuspected and unseen guiding hand of the God of War that preserved her. Perhaps it had been her own genetic advantages. In any case, during that time she _had_ become brilliant. Soon Xena's apprenticeship ended, when Mithridates signed a non-aggression treaty with the Roman Consul Sulla and withdrew to Pontus. The girl from Thrace was on her own and she made the best of it.

Everyone has to start somewhere. At 19, Xena deposed the syphilitic leader of a gang of sullen thugs, ambitious morons, and violent sociopaths. They were a sorry crew, but they were the best she could do at the time. By playing to their natural inclinations, she'd transformed them into an army of greedy pirates patterned after Mithridates' allies, the Cilicians. Her first lieutenant had been the assassin, Thersites; it had kept her on her toes. Xena had been manic and grandiose in those days. Still, before the year was out they had nearly taken the city of Corinth...after laying waste to Cirra along the way.

Xena had used surprisingly unorthodox tactics against Corinth. First, she'd sent a quack oracle into the city, prophesizing a plague from Hygea, the Goddess of Health. Next, she'd captured a con man named Salmoneus, and had browbeaten him into selling the soap that she'd laced with the concentrated juices from poison sumac to the quartermaster of the Corinthian army. She not only got a good price, but the plague became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The unsuspecting Corinthians had washed themselves fervently for a week. The resulting rashes and itching had kept the city's soldiers from donning armor, or counterattacking outside their walls. Ironically, Xena and the con man became friends.

Xena had attacked the Corinthian army using arrows poisoned with the venom and juices from decomposing vipers. Understanding the value of drama, her catapults had rained the city's walls at night with firebombs; clay pots filled with sulfur and turpentine that had been thickened with bee's wax. When they ran out of proper shot, she and her artillery crews had gotten creative. They'd launched chamber pots, rabid dogs, rotting chickens and fish, flaming trees, waterlogged bags of cats, the butchered carcasses from their kitchens, bushels of mice, and ceramic jars of skunks. The defenders had been unnerved by the loud fits of hysterical laughter accompanying the attacks, and had cowered in uncertainty about what would next crash down into their midst from the sky.

Before a thunderstorm, Xena's army had bombarded the city with the bodies of dead Corinthian soldiers, coated with bitumen and then rolled in quicklime. When the rain soaked the cadavers, the quicklime had ignited on contact with water and the tar had been almost impossible to extinguish. The horror of the spontaneously burning dead had crushed the Corinthians' morale. And as always, from outside the walls there had been that demoniacal laughter. Corinth had almost been ready to capitulate. It was 78 BC.

Unfortunately the siege had simply taken too long. Xena had learned that an army of 6,000 was marching from Nemea to reinforce Corinth. Even if she'd taken the city, she didn't have the manpower to defend it. Rather than be caught between the hammer and the anvil, Xena had withdrawn. Knowing that she'd never take the city, she'd ordered the water supply inside and outside the walls poisoned. It was her way of saying farewell to the Corinthians and hello to the Nemeans. Her troops slipped away during the night of the new moon, and the relieved Corinthians had never understood that they'd been besieged by a force numbering only 800. Though the campaign had ultimately failed, Xena's soldiers had loved her ruthlessness and sense of humor. Still, some had grumbled.

Her later loss to Julius Caesar in 77 BC had come at the age of 20, with her pirates outmanned 10 to 1 by the Roman Navy. She had barely escaped to regroup. During the battle she'd somehow made sure that her lieutenant, Thersites, succumbed to a wound from a dagger dipped in black hellbore extract. The grumbling had stopped.

Then Ares had openly declared himself to her and she had accepted his patronage. The later gift of the Chakram of Darkness and his Favor had elevated her warcraft in every respect. The Evil Xena had become the Destroyer of Nations; the preeminent fighter, master tactician, and unparalleled strategist of her age. For almost a year, the girl from Amphipolis had rampaged across the eastern steppes, all the way to Chin. She was the God of War's Chosen now, but there had always been something more, something innate. Soon, she had returned to Greece. She was 21 And it was late 76 BC.

While Rome vacillated, obsessed with her mentor Mithridates' latest plots and crippled by internal politics, Xena took Thrace, Macedonia, and Chalcidice, and then jeopardized most of Thessaly and Euboea, just a stone's throw from Athens itself. In battle she was unstoppable. No champion could withstand her in combat. Her strategies allowed her army, small even by the standards of a city, to overwhelm any defense arrayed against it. Many of their tactics and weapons had never been seen before, and they were applied with ruthlessness and a dark sense of humor. Warriors recognized the Favor of the God of War that mantled her, and in despair they named her the Destroyer of Nations. Thus her enemies chose for her the same title given to her by Ares himself. The terrified populations in the besieged cities had called her the Hellenes' Bane.

It was during this period that Xena first had contact with the Amazons of Macedonia, and for some reason, she resisted engaging them in battle. Perhaps it was because their territory was remote. Perhaps it was because there were few spoils to attract her. For all practical purposes, Xena and the Amazons ignored each other at that time, though there are some cryptic references in Gabrielle's scrolls to the existence of lost verbal accounts of her visits to several Amazon villages. Apparently some individuals had welcomed Xena rather warmly. Among these had been the queen and a spirit of evil from the northern tribe, the ectoplasmic projection of the long dead "Blood Shamaness", Alti.

_(In an example of irony that might be construed as destiny, it fell to the Roman general Pompey to finally defeat King Mithridates in 65 BC. For his victory in the Third Mithridatic War, Pompey earned the title Magnus, "The Magnificent". Forced to flee, Mithridates killed himself in 63 BC to avoid capture. It would be only five years later, in 58 BC, that Xena would avenge her old mentor by slaying Pompey the Magnus and slaughtering his legions, thinking that he had been responsible for Eve's kidnapping. Of all the poxes that the King of Pontus devised and sent against Rome, Xena was perhaps the worst, for in her, he had helped to create a weapon far more destructive than his poisons or his pirates. It may also be interesting to note that as Xena became increasingly deadly, Mithridates became increasingly prone to defeat. Perhaps in that historic trend we see evidence of the shifting patronage of the God of War.) Editor _

By the time she was 24, Xena had been regarded as such a threat by the Greeks that a coalition of Athenians and Corinthians, reinforced by their slaves and Italian mercenaries, and numbering over 78,000 men at arms, had finally defeated her primary army of 6,500. Even so, she had decimated them while retreating across Euboea, her troops slaying a tenth part of the Greek army and wounding another fifth. Finally Xena's forces had been forced to withdraw, slipping away after stampeding burning cattle into their enemy's ranks and igniting caustic smoke pots to provide cover while boarding their ships.

Xena had disbanded and scattered her 4,800 survivors to preserve their lives, and had given up being a warlord. For the rest of her days, she would sometimes meet a warrior who had served under her, and many of these former soldiers remained faithful allies almost thirty years later. It was a testament to the inspiration of her leadership and the force of her will that in 44 BC, when she came to Rome to destroy Callisto, she and Gabrielle were aided by old comrades from the army she'd disbanded in 72 BC.

After retreating from Euboea, Xena realized that she'd been surprisingly unfulfilled by the battles, sickened by the moral compromises that military practice demanded, and revolted by the aftermath of war. What scant glory she'd reaped didn't justify dying for, and running an empire was more trouble than it was worth. Xena recognized that conquest had become an unhealthy obsession, an end unto itself. It had become her master and she had always resented servitude. When she was honest about it, she discerned that it had never really been her goal anyway. In fact, the entire experience had snowballed out of any reasonable proportion, into an avalanche of unseemly and cliched bloodletting. There'd been no meter or verse to it, only rationalizations for continuing on to another campaign. Maybe it had been the constant immersion in her _katalepsis_.

When she'd stepped back from it, the spectacle had surprised her. She'd become nothing more than another thug, cynical and basically predictable, though more successful than most. Xena had never felt infected by a great destiny either. That had been Caesar's affectation, and she'd despised him. A touch of egotism had revealed that she was perhaps following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, and he had ended up dead. It had all been done before...many times. As a way of life, it lacked originality, and worse, it lacked nobility. She'd found herself laughing at inappropriate times.

The warrior had been disillusioned and jaded, and yes, confused. Xena had never awakened one morning and decided to become a hero because what she'd done was "wrong". Being the violent product of violent times in a violent world, she hadn't been crippled by a guilty conscience over her past. She hadn't been obsessed with atonement.

The TV show had applied a modern Judeo-Christian moral perspective that hadn't existed in ancient times. This was especially true outside of the greater cities, in landscapes populated with astonishingly simple peasants. There were the herders scarcely more learned than their beasts, farmers with more dirt in their skulls than on their hands, and townsfolk so provincial that they regarded the inhabitants of adjacent valleys as foreigners. If Xena had been borderline brilliant, then the people she moved among were merely borderline. It was almost a truism that half the people possessing a sword had been willing to use it on those that didn't, while the other half of the armed population were so stupid that they'd been most likely to cut themselves. Despite the high ideals preserved in literature and philosophy, morals in Xena's time were rarer than goats' beaks and even more seldom lived up to. The common denominator of society was selfishness, its corollary, greed, and both were expected with more certainty than old age. Xena's behavior was hardly out of place, nor was she considered exceptionally "bad".

_(In fact, by modern standards, perhaps a quarter of the population of Hellas would have been institutionalized and medicated, and another quarter incarcerated in prison. Someone like Gabrielle, not only beautiful, but also literate and capable of thinking, was such a rarity that of course Xena found her intensely attractive. This also explains the cloned warrior's comments about certain moderns being "retarded". And yes, the ancients would often spontaneously gather like gaggles of malicious children, to gawk at and ridicule the mentally deficient or insane.) Editor _

Back then, the rural poor regarded warlords as normal. Like a flood, a drought, or an early frost, Xena was accepted just as those before her had been for the last 1,000 years. The common people actually saw the weather as more capricious and hostile. The slave population couldn't have cared less about who was riding through the countryside, skimming wealth that was beyond their grasp anyway. Yes, there were some elements of society that had considered her "evil", but truthfully, these were mostly rich city folk with a vested interest, who stood to lose their status. They and the other warlords had been her preferred targets, and most of the dead had been combatants, not unarmed villagers. _(Cirra had been an embarrassing aberration really, burned to the ground during an ill-conceived pyrotechnic experiment that had run out of control under Thersites' direction. Their plunder, the wealth of the village, had amounted to 137 obols, or about $1.37, sixteen chickens, two casks of bad wine, a lame goat, and seven pigs with trichinosis...hardly worth the effort of a day's sweat.) Editor_

Xena's army hadn't usually ridden through hamlets and villages slaughtering and burning. For the most part, she passed such places by. There was seldom a strategic advantage to rural campaigns, very little plunder to be gained, and such actions only increased the danger to her troops by alienating the populace, most of whom despised the rich far more than her. Such behavior was generally relatively rare and had been grossly exaggerated in the period dramas popular with the upper class. The misrepresentations of warlords had persisted and wound up in movies and literature long after the realities of the times had faded past recall. Very few literary works mentioned that the sanctioned armies of the old time city-states had treated the commoners no better.

When Xena quit, it was for practical and philosophical reasons. She certainly hadn't been suicidal with remorse, as the TV show had presented her. Xena had only been sure that she didn't want to be just another marauder, no matter how proficient, but she was still Ares' Favorite, and she still retained the Destroyer of Nations' _katalepsis_, along with the chakram and all her hard won prowess and rage. She would always be a warrior.

Now that same rage existed again in the Warrior Princess' clone, ready to lash out at a modern world that had no framework to comprehend its uncompromising potency. No one in the modern world believed in or understood the profundity of a god's Favor. No one living in the 21st century had any way to appraise the inevitability of results that it conferred. Knowing these things, Gabrielle fretted and worried.

In New Zealand, Ares had declared that, _"She still has my favor whether she wants to be my Chosen Warrior or not...."_ It was an individual and unique recognition beyond the God of War's patronage, but now there was more. _"If you want it, you have my Blessing."_ The cloned bard had overheard Ares' words, and they had sounded so simple, so benevolent, but Gabrielle was one of only two living souls who knew from experience just what had been offered. Patronage was one thing, shown to many outstanding warriors, and a God's Chosen, or Favorite, was the mortal embodiment of a god's domain, but Ares' Blessing was another matter. It was the God of War's promise of unconditional support, within his sphere of governance, during a campaign.

In New Zealand, Ares had claimed that, _"Though I can still meddle a little here and there, mankind has their precious free will."_ Despite that, there had been something different about him tonight. Maybe it was the rage she'd felt from him, maybe it had been his use of command to negate her own free will, or maybe it was the gravity of his words. Something had changed in the God of War as surely as discovering Eve's body had changed Xena. Gabrielle realized that by offering his Blessing, Ares had declared that he was willing to act directly and decisively in the modern world. The implications were horrifying, especially with Xena in her present state of mind.

Gabrielle could only wonder how many tens of thousands would die by Xena's sword and the masterful will that drove it. And that was the real point. Her soulmate's will was by far more powerful than even her sword arm, her tactics, or her physical strength. Seldom did such a will converge with such fury, and almost never when empowered by the blessing of a god. Xena could claim the God of War's Blessing with a word, and he would grant it willingly to his Chosen. To see her magnificence revealed again in battle would be irresistible to Ares. With that Blessing, almost nothing would be impossible. The cloned bard wouldn't have been at all surprised to find Xena capable of subverting the HRT to her command, or all of the US Marines they'd seen in Quantico.

Though no modern mortal believed, Xena believed without reservation, and Gabrielle believed too. Such belief was second nature to their ancient souls, an unquestioned and established fact. It was a given that had been proven over and over again in their original lives. The God of War's Favorite, the ancient Destroyer of Nations; this time she would be conducting a divinely sanctioned war whose goal was vengeance alone, whose cause was beyond amendment, and whose pool of enemies was vaster than the Roman Empire.

As she stood gazing at her silent soulmate, Gabrielle recalled a character variant from the TV show, _Hercules: The Legendary Journeys_, that had been the sister production of _Xena: Warrior Princess_. In an episode entitled _"Armageddon Now Pt 2"_, there'd been an appearance by Xena the Conqueror, Ruler of the Known World. It had been the nightmare foreshadowing of a path not taken long ago, lost to eternity.

The world was bigger now, the populations more numerous, and the weapons more deadly, but what could become the determining factor was the revisitation of a destiny that had never been more than a distant possibility in their original lives. Though the clones had found the episode hysterically implausible, the image of her beloved soulmate having her crucified and then ordering a soldier to, _"Break her legs,"_ had given Gabrielle nightmares. Now her bardic imagination helplessly gnawed at the possibility of a modern Conqueror, ruthless and efficient. The thoughts made the blonde's stomach churn.

Stop it, Gabrielle, the bard sternly told herself, you'll end up with an ulcer, or maybe even a fistula like Joxer. Yuck! You know that worrying and planning are two different things, and so are brooding and conquering. Anyway, Harry Tasker blew up the lab, and Xena didn't accept Ares' offer...yet. Now get a move on. Dawn's close. Focus on that.

_(In a time of ancient medicine, hygiene, and inflammations, a land without modern antibiotics cried out for a cure. Local infections often ate away tissues and the resulting perforations could lead to new connections between organs, usually those opening onto the outside world where the germs had gotten in to begin with. It was relatively common before the advent of penicillin. So pick any two pelvic organs and imagine the leakage, the smells...the inappropriate discharges. Like she said, "Yuck!") Editor _

Gabrielle lifted the gallon cans one after another, splashing the #2 fuel oil onto the wood. The vapors wafting up smelled very much like kerosene, and she held her breath until she could step away. To the cloned bard, the scent recalled the mixture of distilled naphtha, wax, quicklime, and sulfur that had been called "Greek Fire". It was another disquieting thought. Finally the blonde moved clear of the fumes and took up the torch.

"Pyre's ready, Xena," she mumbled, feeling overwhelmed. "It's almost dawn."

With a nod of acknowledgement the cloned warrior lifted the shrouded cadaver of her daughter. Xena paced to the pyre and gently placed Eve's corpse atop the logs. For several moments she stood in silence looking down at the body, seemingly immune to the vapors, and then she stepped away, coming to stand next to the bard.

Cloned Gabrielle gave her a quick glance and then tossed the torch into the runoff fuel. Together they watched as the flames raced in an impatient trail along the ground to the pyre. A couple of heartbeats passed and then the stacked wood went up in a violent whoosh of ignition. A wall of fire leaped into being as the oil fumes flashed, surging upwards two-dozen feet, a blinding dance of heat and light that stabbed out into the last of the darkness. It threw the clones' shadows lurching back against the trees, where they strobed and cowered like fitful shades seen through rapidly blinking eyelids. The rapacious pyre suctioned the surrounding air into a roaring updraft, snapping and crackling, and flinging up showers of sparks and eddies of smoke as the wood caught. The clones could feel the radiant heat of combustion on their skin as their eyes adjusted to the brightness. Soon they could smell the mixed scent of smoke born from both oil and wood.

For a few minutes they stood in silence. Then the light of Eos graced the eastern sky. First in violet and then in hues of rose, the brightening dawn painted the wisps of clouds far above the black silhouettes of the trees. Somewhere overhead a jet faintly roared, like the cry of a soul ascending from the mortal realm, and a steady voice rose to meet it.

Xena offered up the melancholy notes of the requiem clear and strong, singing the haunting melody that followed the flames and smoke into the dawn blushed sky. Despite her sorrow, her voice never wavered or faltered. There was no flaw in her pitch or in her memory of the words. They were sung in the Thracian dialect of the Attic Greek colony of Amphipolis, a city founded in 437 BC by the Athenians. By Xena's time, the language had picked up the cosmopolitan taints of the Hellenistic era, along with Roman slang, but Xena had composed the lyrics devoid of foreign vernacular. It was the equivalent of a 21st century American singing in the King's English of the 1700s.

The Warrior Princess had sung to honor many pyres, and Gabrielle sometimes felt that she had listened in silence too many times over the years. Hades had probably known that tune by heart, she thought, and perhaps Persephone had sung it in some dark and lonely moment as she wished for the blue of the sky. So many friends and allies had been sent on their way to judgement as she'd listened to Xena perform. The song still chilled Gabrielle and brought tears to her eyes as it carried her far into a past life.

Perhaps the first time she'd heard that melancholy strain was as she'd stood beside the funeral of her cousin Perdicus, slain by the maniacal Callisto in 71 BC. The hapless militiaman of Potidaea had been one of the "Warrior Queen's" early casualties during her first escape from custody. Xena had been wracked with guilt and Gabrielle had been crestfallen, wishing that she'd never urged the warrior to bring the Cirran to trial.

At the time, the bard had thought the song was traditional in Thrace. Only later had she learned that Xena had composed it herself for the death of her brother, Lyceus, nine years before. The funeral requiem had been born amidst the rubble of Xena's first battle, attaching itself to her like a war orphan and dogging her footsteps through a lifetime of fighting. It had represented beauty in the wake of carnage and heartbreak, offering her a measure of solace after the violence.

That same song had accompanied Xena's 5-year-old son to his rest a year later, following an attack by the warlord Krykus against the Macedonian Amazons. It had been less than two candlemarks after Xena had returned to the village with a bag of meat that dripped the warlord's blood. The Destroyer of Nations had avenged both the Amazons and her doomed child, but it had been the Warrior Princess who'd sung.

Somehow Xena always managed to honor the dead with a flawless rendition, no matter how devastated she'd been by the person's death. The blonde listened in silence yet again, knowing her soulmate was sublimating her emotions into a tapestry woven of notes and words, expressing her sorrow in a tribute that demanded the unwavering focus of a warrior. Singing the requiem was as much a discipline as what she did with a sword. Xena rendered it with the same sense of focus and technical perfection. And as always in the aftermath, when the last word had been held and the last note faded, the bard found her ears hypersensitive, and all the mundane noises of the world leaped at her with discomfiting ferocity.

For perhaps another half-candlemark they stood side by side in silent tribute to the dead, and then Gabrielle turned to her soulmate with a questioning glance. The sun was up now, and she was dog-tired. The previous day's emotional drain had been worse than the nearly 24 hours of constant activity on a miserably unsatisfying amount of food. Besides the malted milk balls, she hadn't eaten since a hasty lunch of energy bars and Gatorade, and she was exhausted. As Xena turned to answer her, she snuck a glance into her soulmate's eyes and saw a weariness and sadness greater than she'd seen at any time in their present lives. It gave the blonde a temporary feeling of relief. For a while yet, Xena could still be the Warrior Princess, not only the Destroyer of Nations.

"Think I'll stay a while longer," Xena answered, her voice roughened by fatigue and sorrow. The warrior held the bard's eyes for a moment and then softy advised, "G'wan back to the house, Gabrielle. Ya look tired." It was the most she'd said in hours.

"I'd rather wait here with you, Xena," Gabrielle replied, "but I could use a nap."

The blonde clone gave her soulmate a sad hinted smile of support, and then she turned away. Her steps took her to the edge of the clearing where she picked a tree at random, kicking away a couple stones and a stray fallen branch at its base. From yet another pocket, Gabrielle withdrew a survival blanket and unfolded the thin crinkly sheet of metalized Mylar, wrapping it around herself like a chrysalis of golden foil. Then she lay down on her side with a drift of leaves beneath her and the trunk at her back, partially curling her body, caterpillar-like, and putting a hand under her head. Her eyes revealed a sideways vista of Xena standing stock-still before the flaming pyre a few yards away. Slowly the exhausted bard let her eyelids slip down until they shut. She abandoned her worries and let Hypnos take her down into the velvety healing metamorphosis of sleep.

_**November 8, 2001 - An Undisclosed Location in Washington, D.C.**_

Amidst the banks of high tech communications equipment that lined the walls in a spacious air-conditioned room, four men nervously sat around a conference table. The almost chilly air did nothing to cool the emotional atmosphere, heated well beyond any comfort range by their collective tension. This room, this table, and the technologically gifted environment surrounding it had witnessed many mission debriefings over the decades that it had existed. Seldom had the events of the outside world and the impending threats they signified created such a palpable air of uncertainty.

In most cases, Omega Sector could rely on its capabilities and assets to resolve whatever situations it faced. The agency was the elite player among the free world spy shops, regularly hoodwinking the rest of the intelligence community, both friend and foe. No Sector operative had ever been compromised and no attribution of any of their operations had ever been confirmed, so that for all practical purposes, the agency did not exist. Though some informed members within the family of covert bureaus did suspect the presence of an independently functioning "factor", none had even a shred of evidence to support their beliefs. Omega Sector enjoyed complete invisibility. It was subject to no legal oversight by any authority, and in theory, answered only to the President of the United States. In fact, since its creation, three administrations hadn't even been appraised of its existence.

Being as it was, above the law, the situation could have been a recipe for disaster, but Omega Sector had one unbendable control. Since its inception, it had been under the sole direction of Spencer Trilby, a man of unimpeachable character and resolve. Like any wise dictator, Trilby had built safeguards into his creation. Upon his retirement, Omega Sector would cease to exist. Its funding would dry up, its files would be scrubbed and opened, and its personnel would be relocated. It would not become a dynasty or empire, and it would never be allowed to threaten the way of life it sought to protect.

Yet now, Omega Sector had uncovered a threat so unique and so unexpected that even Spencer Trilby knew doubt and fear. The current debriefing had rendered such a loading of uncertainty, and prophesized such danger, that he was at a loss as to how to proceed. After 45 years in covert operations, Spencer felt that he might finally be out of his depth.

For a wistful moment he allowed himself to long for the counsel of his one-time mentor, Alexander Waverly. The old spymaster, who had headed the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, had died in his sleep of a massive coronary over 20 years before. Trilby realized that wishing for his guidance now was just a product of maudlin sentimentality rooted in his own uncertainty. No doubt it was symptomatic of an unbecoming subconscious desire to shirk his duty to make a decision. To his credit, Spencer Trilby shrugged off his small lapse of focus and concentrated on the information that his team had provided about the raid.

The head of Omega Sector turned the discussion to the disc that had been taken from the cloning lab in Georgia the previous night. It had been removed from a machine in the curtained alcove where the cloned body of Xena's daughter had been found. They had watched it in silence after their lab had finished with an extensive and intensive technical analysis, and the material was highly disturbing.

"Harry, you're absolutely certain that the contents of the disc included information that was never part of the series?" Spencer Trilby needed to be sure of this point.

"Sir, I've watched every episode that included an appearance by the Bitch of Rome or the Messenger of Peace. What we saw on _'Livia 3.1'_ was never part of the series."

"Could it have been outtakes?" Albert Gibson's question was a good one, but....

"I don't think so, Gib," Harry answered slowly, "the costumes, weapons, and settings were completely different from those on the show. They were much more authentic to the late Roman Republic." Harry Tasker fell silent for several moments, gathering his thoughts. "Also, the choices of camera angles, movements, and lenses weren't consistent with those used in the episodes. There were too many details included, and the framing wasn't composed aesthetically. It really wasn't cinematography. It's almost as if..." uncharacteristically he trailed off.

"As if what, Harry?" Trilby wanted his agents' impressions as well as the facts.

"Sir, it's as if the point of view was omniscient. The camera's positions don't appear to have been restricted to what dollies, booms, or cranes are capable of. In the opening mass battle scene the camera movement includes what would have to have been shot from a helicopter, a dolly track, and then a crane up at the end to a close up on Livia's face. The last parts would have required equipment placed within the crowd of fighters, but it wasn't visible at the start. It's not done with cuts or cross dissolves between matched shots, and the focal length of the lens doesn't shift. The lighting levels aren't consistent either. It should have required several adjustments of the exposure, but that would have affected the depth of focus, and it doesn't change at all. The shot's seamless."

"Uh, sir, the lab hasn't been able to discern any grain structure in the footage," Faisil added, uncomfortable as always and speaking for the first time, "and that's consistent for the whole disc. They, uh, don't think it was shot on any filmstock they've ever seen."

"Could it have been shot with a high quality video system?" Spencer asked.

"No," Harry said, "the resolution is too high for any known video recording system. Each frame holds more information than a 35mm cine frame. The disc format is double DVD...9.4 GB, and the running time is only one hour."

"I see," Spencer mused. He stared off into space, his gaze unfocused as he tried to decipher what the information meant.

"One other thing," Harry added, somewhat tentatively, as he recaptured his boss' attention. It wasn't anything concrete that was subject to analysis; just an impression he had. "The gestalt of the experience is more documentary than dramatic. It's as if one is being treated to a view of real history, not the expression of an interpretation or concept. It's not creative, it doesn't tell a story, and there's no 'message'. It shows vignettes of Livia's life as a Roman, nothing more. It's simply background, raw information, like a file without a summary or a conclusion."

That made sense to Trilby, since the disc's purpose was to trigger memories in a clone, not to entertain an audience. The main point, the one that disturbed him most about the disc, was the same point that had come up throughout their debriefing. Clones of Callisto, Mavican, and Livia...all long dead, their remains forever lost in the dust of time. Even science had its limits.

"Where did it come from, Harry?" He asked.

"Sir, I don't know."

"I see," Trilby said, falling silent. At least they still had the hair samples.

_**November 8, 2001 - Columbia, South Carolina**_

For a long time Xena stood, staring into the flames of her daughter's pyre, just brooding in silence while her audience of shadows inched closer to their sources as the morning sun rode up into the sky. The hypnotic movements of the fire, short-lived shapes so random in their single-minded intent to devour, seemed to hold the attention of her unblinking eyes. It was such a characteristic activity for the warrior. She had spent uncounted hours at innumerable campfires, seemingly absorbed in skrying for meanings amidst the changeling forms that leapt from the wood. The warrior appeared to be lost, disassociated from the world. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Instead, her consciousness had elected to run on two parallel levels, both fully aware. Rather than silence her internal dialog as she did while in a meditative state, Xena had split herself, conducting two simultaneous dialogs, one internal, the other interfacing with the world.

On one level Xena's senses had focused outwards, and she was aware of everything around her with a crystalline clarity gifted to her by a god. She marked the stench of burning hair amidst the woodsmoke, the direction of the fitful breeze that nervously brushed her skin, the brittle traverse of leaves across the ground in its wake, and Gabrielle's soft even breathing rustling the Mylar of her survival blanket. Thirty paces to her left a wary squirrel had circumnavigated a trunk on its way to forage among the litter and leafmould. It's tiny clawed feet skittered in another clutching transit across the bark, bringing it to nine feet above the ground. From a quarter mile away she heard a door bang open, and shortly she discerned Danielle's voice calling her name and Gabrielle's, softened by the distance to a ghost's whisper. And as always, the warrior scanned her surroundings for threats.

On another level, Xena was far from the clearing on the Pappas estate. On that level she sifted information, scrutinized and rejected plans, analyzed actions, and examined motives. She had focused on her resources, mapping the near past and present like the topography of a battlefield in a war yet to come. Here she functioned as a _strategos_, marshalling the landscape of her knowledge as she would the assets of an army before a campaign.

The bits an' pieces of the plot Harry suspected are leading to somethin' bigger than what he'd mentioned, Xena acknowledged. Even I can see that. Harry's plot starts from the clones' threat. Doesn't really explain the presence of the enemies Gabrielle and I've encountered though. Certainly doesn't explain Eve either. Science couldn't have created those clones without somethin' to start from.

Whether Harry saw it or not, Xena did, discerning it as the crux of the problem.

Even she and her soulmate hadn't been recreated using genuine material from ancient times. They'd been grown from cells left behind in Ares' tomb by Janice Covington and Melinda Pappas in the 1940s, a scant 60 years ago. But Callisto, Mavican, and Valesca must all have arisen through the manipulation of DNA taken from their original sources.

But Mavican and Valesca left no descendants. I'm sure of it, Xena thought. We knew that in our own time, having witnessed their deaths. Science can't explain this by itself 'cause Valesca and Mavican were cremated. There was nothin' of them left to clone from, even back then. And somehow, I just can't see Callisto pregnant, let alone as someone's mother. Dead end...next point.

Ares said that war's different nowadays from what we knew. Well, from what I've seen, human nature's as bad as it's ever been, but the weapons have gotten worse. Harry's tactics were pretty much the same as what I'd have done, but his technology was updated. That's what's changed most ...the technology of warfare. And there's so much more of that, in warfare and in everyday life. Janice'd had a kidney replaced. We drive around in a car. We've got hot water and electric lights. We've flown in airplanes. Science did all that. The cloned Warrior Princess shook her head in amazement. The whole world's run by science now...it's like it's takin' over.

Well, Ares said we needed to embrace the present an' look to the future now. Then he showed me that vision of myself leadin' an army of clones. Of course, he saw them armed with swords and chakrams, fighting in ranks and files like in ancient times,Xena recalled, allowing herself a smile at that. Huh, we are pretty much the same deep inside.

It was obvious to Xena that the God of War was as much a product of the past as she was when it came to how they thought and the way they imagined things. Yet, the army of clones had worn body armor like Callisto and Mavican's and they'd had a way of vanishing from their enemies while still being visible to each other. They'd recovered the Chakram of Day and duplicated the Combined Chakram. They'd done it all in five years...grown, trained, armed, and deployed her clone army, and then prosecuted the war to its final deciding conflict on that battleground in Ares' vision. Xena could guess what was to come after. No longer the Destroyer of Nations, she would rule all nations as the Conqueror. But where had Gabrielle been? She hadn't appeared in the vision at all.

These thoughts occupied Xena's concentration for some time while the outside world continued without her participation. Clouds came and went, plants slept, animals foraged, and somewhere an enemy counted her losses. Xena pondered as the morning progressed and the pyre burned. There was a lot in that vision to think about, quaint as it had been. It was more than the God of War's fantasy of having his Favorite leading an unstoppable army in conquest. There were details that she'd overlooked at first, and now they clamored for her attention.

This was something Xena had always been capable of, and it had astonished Gabrielle many times, even after years together. Mnemosyne had blessed the Warrior Princess. With concentration she was able to recall incidents in detail and conversations verbatim, even after years had passed, and even when the original incidents had occurred during times of stress. Many times it had solved her later dilemmas by providing some crucial piece of information. Many times it had changed her course and saved her life.

In 67 BC Eve had been a burbling one-year-old. The soulmates had been spending most of their time among the Amazons of the new Queen Terreis since returning from their second trip to Chin. With the new baby, Eve, both Xena and Gabrielle had hoped for a more peaceful lifestyle, a respite of sorts from their ongoing adventures, in the somewhat insulated environment of the village. They were both weary from a string of traumatic experiences the year before. That previous year, 68 BC, had not been pleasant.

That trip to Chin had been a series of moral compromises in which the Warrior Princess and the Amazon Bard had participated in a travesty of justice and wound up temporarily directing a war. In defeating Ming Tien's black powder army, over thirty thousand had died. Xena and Gabrielle had captured Ming Tien and turned him over to the Laos for a "trial", (in absentia and sans council), whose outcome had been so preordained that his execution was a foregone conclusion. As soon as Ming's army surrendered, Lao Tzu and Lao Ma had summarily dismissed the soulmates with barely a "thank you". Forced to swallow a hundred pounds of lead, Ming Tien's corpse had barely dropped from the gibbet before the Laos proceeded to slaughter another ninety-one thousand people. The additional victims who'd literally "lost face", (from the removal of noses, lips, ears, tongues, or eyes), had been beyond count. The soulmates found that they'd traded a foreign country's present for their homeland's future in a gamble on the lesser of two evils. Greece wouldn't face the Green Dragon's black powder army, but the results of their choice had made them both sick.

Upon their return to Greece, the soulmates had been greeted by the etheric simulacrum of Alti, who was again plotting to force Xena to aid her in the destruction of the Amazon Nation. Xena was within a half-moon of giving birth to Eve and was in no condition to fight, regardless of how the TV series portrayed her pregnancy.

Alti had enlisted the assistance of a grandiose malcontent, the Amazon warrior Valesca, to whom she had provided the venom of an asp from Numidia mixed with the narcotic honey of Colchis. Valesca, chafing ingrate that she was, had managed to poison her adoptive aunt, the reigning queen, Melosa, with the neurotoxin tainted wine sweetener, causing her death and destabilizing the nation. The queen had been found collapsed at her table the next morning, beside a cup and a wineskin. Poisoning had never been in doubt, but the culprit had been uncertain. This knowledge was restricted to a few while the regicide was being investigated. That same morning Valesca had challenged Princess Terreis for the throne, renewing Xena's suspicions.

In fact, Xena had been suspicious of Valesca for years, having never really liked her. She'd twitched with an ambition that was very recognizable to the ex-warlord, and she'd been the leader of the few warriors to have spoken against her soulmate being made a friend of the nation in 70 BC, after Gabrielle had defended Terreis during Krykus' attack.

Now it was early winter. It had been a bad years for bees, for the previous spring had been very dry and flowers hadn't been abundant. What little honey that had been collected from the Amazon combs in late summer had been used up weeks before, mostly in brewing mead. Being the adopted niece of the queen had put Valesca in a position of access to Melosa's wine, and her challenge to the princess displayed the goal of her ambitions. Terreis would never have poisoned her mother. The young woman had been distraught since discovering Melosa's body and was in no shape to fend off a challenge. Xena had pondered the mystery.

The night after Melosa's death, Alti struck. Her spirit emanated an ectoplasmic "fetch", an astral projection of her original body, which had been dead for over three hundred years. For a short time, she could act in the physical world without manifesting a real physical presence. Her actions amounted to a poltergeist activity.

In the very same clearing in which the soulmates would later kill Mavican in 59 BC, the "Blood Shamaness" had performed a ritual for the theft of a soul. She'd slaughtered a pregnant mare, drank its unborn foal's blood, and entered the etheric strata of the mortal world to capture the soul of Xena's child. Alti's actions would be anonymous on the physical strata, but the ritual itself would reveal the magick as Amazon.

From the very start, she had no intentions of allowing Eve to live. The baby would be forfeit, embittering the Destroyer of Nations and making her all the more receptive to Alti's dark influences. By inflaming Xena with grief through the use of an Amazon ritual, she sought to turn the warrior against the nation, a nation whose defense would be marshaled by the incompetent Valesca. Perhaps Xena would even place the blame for the ritual on Valesca herself, ridding Alti of a "loose end" in a fit of vengeance. But Alti had never figured Gabrielle into her calculations. The blonde wasn't even a real Amazon.

That night a strange thing occurred, but by then, strange things were a way of life for Xena and Gabrielle. The soulmates dreamed the same unnatural nightmare, for where one went the other followed, even into the hidden realms of the mortal world.

_"Who's there? Show yourself!" Xena challenged. Her finely tuned senses screamed that she wasn't alone, but the brooding soot-black silence surrendered no clues as to the identity of the interloper. A shiver skipped down her spine, chilling gooseflesh from skin that crawled. She felt evil. Confident evil. A dark chuckle answered her. "Alti."_

_A torch sputtered to light, blinding in the previously cave-dark dreamscape._

_"Hello, Xena," Alti taunted, displaying a crooked grin. "Looks like you have something for me...looks like you've been growing something for me." She stared at the warrior's belly with malicious intent. _

_"I'll kill you if you even try to lay a hand on this child," Xena told the shamaness through gritted teeth, "by Hades, I'd kill you as soon as look at you," she swore as she reached for her sword. She found that she couldn't move a muscle._

_"Ah, ah, ahhh, Xena. I've been there and done that, and death is my friend. Besides, Hades has no hold on me and you can't kill the dead...not while I control your dream."_

_Xena struggled, but it was all in her mind. In this dreamscape, she was immobilized. Alti drew closer, smirking down at her with relish and gloating over her helplessness. She reached out with a shriveled hand and raised Xena's cotton shift, baring her legs and her swollen belly. The baby kicked, wise to feel the fear, as Alti's birdlike claw stroked Xena's body in a caress more of cold appraisal than passion. A jagged curved dagger appeared in her other hand and she moved to begin the cutting._

_"You'll feel everything, and you'll remember nothing," Alti promised, "and like Valesca, you'll help me do what I couldn't do at home. Melosa's death was as sweet as Cyane's."_

_A scream cut the silence, jabbing Gabrielle's heart and shocking her very bones. She'd been walking with the silent stealth of a hunter, through blackness darker than any night. The atmosphere felt close, oppressive with fear, and she'd swallowed convulsively as a torch had flared up somewhere ahead. Urgency seized her. Muttered words she couldn't make out teased her ears with a sense of danger and malicious intent. She felt that immediacy with her warrior's perception, and it was a threat to her very soul. With the scream came a need that obliterated any caution she'd held. She knew that voice. Xena! _

_"By the gods...."_

_Mindless of any danger, Gabrielle charged forward towards whatever lay ahead._

_She crossed the distance in heartbeats. Horror awaited her. Her beloved partner lay pinioned on the ground as if staked out, and over her crouched a monster in the guise of a northern shamaness. Xena was writhing in anguish, wild-eyed, panting and whimpering as she helplessly struggled, her belly already a pool of blood that flowed in rivulets down her sides. Her tormentor was cutting at her with a crude ritual blade._

_Gabrielle didn't stop to think. She may have been screaming as her protective instincts doubled...her heart, their child. The sais were in her hands and she plunged the spike blades into the attacker's back with all her strength. Bones cracked under the shoulder-flesh as the weapons went in hilt deep. She felt the tips gnashing against each other somewhere inside. Then the bard leaned in and used the leverage of her embedded weapons to haul the monster backward off of Xena's body._

_The enemy tilted her head up, seeking eye contact with her, and Gabrielle looked into a dissolving horror. A death's head glared at her with heart-stopping hatred. She saw shriveled mummified skin, dried by its frozen barrow on the Siberian tundra. It was centuries dead, but animated with malign guile and potent evil. The fading eyes bored into her own, seeking a hold on her soul, seeking to capture her through her rage and use her even in this moment of defeat. The blonde looked back at the apparition as it became translucent and cocked her head. She marked the rapidly diminishing danger._

_Defeat was defeat, and Gabrielle's only concern now was for Xena, for the baby...for the living. The threat was vanquished and the young Potidaean had never been one for gloating. She turned away from her enemy offering only dismissal. _

_In that moment, Gabrielle handed Alti a defeat such as she had never endured in all her three and a half centuries of conjuring. The blonde hadn't even paused to project a delicious wave of hate that would have sparked her healing. Gabrielle dragged her weapons from Alti's fading flesh and cast them aside, and without a word to the sorceress, she lunged to Xena's aid. Tears had streamed down her cheeks as her trembling hands had touched the wounds before the spell broke. _

_In the next moment both of them vanished from the dreamscape, leaving Alti to crawl home down an ectoplasmic thread through the ether and begin the slow process of recouping her power. With the ritual interrupted, the shamaness hadn't been able to complete her spell. Xena's child was safe. Xena and Gabrielle remembered everything. They'd awakened simultaneously in their hut in the Amazon village and had begun to compare notes. _

Alti's gloating, as she'd hacked at Xena's womb, had revealed Valesca as an accomplice, but it hadn't explained the mechanism or the specifics. Those had become clearer later that morning._ "...like Valesca, you'll help me do what I couldn't do at home. Melosa's death was as sweet as Cyane's."_ The plot had begun in the northern tribe, 350 years ago.

Alti had been both a tribal shamaness and Queen Cyane's niece, and like Valesca, the second in line for the throne. But Cyane was no fool. She'd perceived both Alti's evil and her growing power, and she'd understood the threat she was to her own daughter, Brysia. Xena knew this story from the time of their first meetings, back during her warlord days, eight years before. Alti had poisoned her queen but failed to win her challenge. Princess Brysia had maimed her in combat and banished her in defeat, then become the next Cyane. Now Alti was attempting to recapitulate an imperfect past, seeking to avenge herself and drag down the Amazon Nation. Valesca was her modern surrogate. Sweet poisoned death....

Ten years before, in 77 BC, Xena's pirates had been defeated by the Roman Navy, under the command of the recently ransomed Gaius Julius Caesar. During the fighting an opportunity had presented itself, and the "Evil" Xena had arranged to dispose of her first lieutenant, the assassin, Thersites. Plunging a dagger coated with black hellbore into his belly had been a good career move. Afterwards, the grumbling among her men, which had begun following the unsuccessful siege of Corinth the previous year, had abruptly ceased. Nevertheless, Xena had gleaned valuable information during her association with Thersites, adding it to what she'd learned from King Mithridates.

_"We paint the whore's lips with the venom of the cone shell from the Indus Sea held in Colchian honey, bringing to the general a poisoned kiss like sweet ambrosia."_ Thus Thersites had assassinated Linius Verellus, a concupiscent henchman of the Roman, Marius Aquillius, whom Mithridates later executed with a draught of molten gold.

_(In Colchis, bees made honey using nectar from the poisonous rhododendrons of the Caucasus, and this honey included a neurotoxin with narcotic effects. It was both potent and deadly, and had brought down whole armies, leaving them incapacitated for slaughter. The poisoned honey was known throughout the lands around the Black Sea, but it was an environmental hazard for foreign invaders and a tool of assassins.) Editor_

As Xena lay in bed idly tangling her fingers in Gabrielle's hair, she remembered Thersites' words, and that Melosa seldom drank wine, and only then if it had been sweetened. The queen had always preferred mead or ale.

"When ya went to see Terreis yesterday after they found Melosa, you said there was a cup and a wine skin on the table, right?" she'd asked her partner, just to certify a fact from the bard's account of the death scene.

"That's what I saw, Xena," Gabrielle had answered, "but they're keeping it quiet until they learn more. I guess Melosa had a deadly nightcap."

"I think I can work with that."

"Xena?"

"Alti said that Melosa's death was as sweet as Cyane's. Alti murdered Cyane with wine laced with poisoned honey. If Melosa drank wine the night she died, it must have been sweetened. So where'd the honey come from?"

"Wish it was summer," Gabrielle had remarked, "all we'd have to do is follow the ants."

Xena had gone to the herbalist's hut and procured a small handful of Adonis, which she brewed into a weak infusion and added to a skin of wine onto which she'd sewn the royal pattern of beads. She then set about observing Valesca's actions, while her soulmate, being a "friend" and not a full Amazon, assisted the kitchen help.

Adonis autumnalis_, also called "False Hellbore" and "Red Chamomile", is a source of Adonidin, a glucoside that was sometimes used warily in place of digitalis.) Editor_

Around mid-afternoon Valesca had strutted into the dining hall and made her way to the kitchen. From her seat on a bench outside the hut that she and Gabrielle shared, Xena raised a single eyebrow and watched more closely, the baby blanket she was knitting forgotten in her hands. Valesca was in her glory, barely concealing her glee at the death of the queen, the despondency of the princess, and the apparently successful progress of her plot. Like any megalomaniac, she was intent on celebrating with her inner circle of lackeys. She was so predictable that Xena couldn't help curling her lip in a sneer.

Being the condescending bitch that she was, Valesca didn't miss the opportunity to bully Gabrielle, whom she considered not only too short to be a warrior, but an Amazon poser and peasant-bred peon as well. Having a measure of royal blood hadn't graced Valesca with graciousness. As soon as she'd seen the bard in the kitchen, she'd demanded a skin of wine, bread, cheese, and fruit, in the most demeaning fashion she could muster. Gabrielle had been only too happy to oblige, since it solved her problem of how to deliver the tainted skin to Valesca's table at the evening meal without raising suspicions. Valesca had accepted the victuals with a remark about the "peasant knowing her place", and left to rejoin her entourage under a shade tree on the village common.

From her bench, Xena had whispered, "good work, my love." The beads on the skin had told her all she needed to know except how irritated her soulmate probably was at Valesca's treatment. "I'll make it up to you somehow," the Warrior Princess had promised with a chuckle.

For another quarter-candlemark, she'd watched in silence as Valesca and her three thugs had picnicked. She'd also kept an eye on which Amazons stopped to speak with them as they passed by, tallying them up like hostiles in a combat situation. Valesca's faction; they seemed to be a distinct minority in the village and included none of the senior warriors or non-combatants.

Suddenly the group of celebrants had begun retching and crying out that they'd been poisoned. The four women were flailing and heaving. At that disturbance, Gabrielle had hastened out of the kitchen and joined a rapidly forming crowd. Xena had set down her knitting and ambled over towards the developing "situation".

"We've been poisoned!" Valesca had shrieked in a spittle spraying rage. She heaved again, and when she'd looked back up she'd seen Gabrielle and immediately pointed at her in accusation, waving the now empty wine skin. "You...you poisoned me!"

"Nonsense," Gabrielle had stated calmly, "that's the same wine everyone drinks, from the queen on down...it might even be the same skin."

At the mention of the queen's wine, Valesca's had eyes had started from her head in horror. She'd looked at the royal beadwork and reeled, nearly passing out.

"Something wrong with that?" Xena had asked innocently from the sidelines.

"It can't be hers...it wasn't sweetened..."

Behind Valesca, the crowd had parted. A nearly full wine skin bearing the same pattern of beads had landed on the ground next to the sick woman, tossed by the angry young Amazon who had just walked up at the head of a half-dozen guards.

"Why don't you have a drink, Valesca? I know you want to be queen. You may as well sample the queen's wine." It was Terreis, and the princess had been livid, her face flushed with anger and her eyes reddened by tears. "I'm sure you'll find it sweet."

"No, no, no! I'm not drinking from that," Valesca had yelled, shrinking back from the skin as if it were a living snake. She'd been shaking and wild-eyed, hugging herself in terror.

"Why ever not?" Xena had asked. "It should be an honor to share Melosa's wine."

Around them, some of the warriors had nodded in agreement and muttered confirmation. It would have honored the late queen's memory for a member of the royal line to toast her thus.

"Drink it, Valesca," Terreis had demanded, her voice hardening with command, "that's an order."

"No, Terreis! I refuse!" Valesca had screamed in panic. She'd finally focused on the hatred sizzling in the princess' emerald eyes, and her beautiful grim face framed by her flaming red hair, and she'd understood. "You're trying to kill me. That's poison!"

She'd been pointing at the skin that lay beside her while cringing away from it. The gathered Amazons standing around had looked at her in shock. She had refused a direct order from the princess. Some had read deeper, understanding the implication that their queen had been poisoned and that Valesca knew something about it. Terreis had narrowed her eyes.

"Solari, Eponin, detain Valesca for refusing my order, and take her friends with her" Terreis had ordered the heads of her guard. "Ephiny, I want this wine sampled by a pig," she'd told her closest friend, nudging Melosa's wine skin with the toe of her boot.

Two royal guards had hauled the gasping Valesca to her feet and began pulling her away. As they'd passed the princess, Terreis had looked her in the eyes and whispered, "your fate will be the same as the pig, Valesca. Perhaps you have some things to tell us about the wine and Queen Melosa's death, or perhaps you'd prefer that a trial decide."

After Valesca and her friends had been dragged off to a cell in the stockade, Terreis had lifted the counterfeit wineskin and fingered the beadwork. A sly grin had curled her lips and she'd searched the slowly dispersing crowd until she'd caught Gabrielle's eye.

"I want to talk with you for a moment," she'd told the blonde who had once saved her life, and then she'd paused for a moment, again searching the crowd. Her eyes had lit on Xena, the wily Warrior Princess even her mother had admired, and this time a chuckle had actually escaped her lips. "You too," she'd said, beckoning to the warrior.

The next day, after the pig had keeled over dead, a recovered but resentful Valesca had appeared before the Amazon leadership, shackled hand and foot with heavy chains. Princess Terreis had conducted her inquisition before the Council of Elders, demanding answers to questions that she'd discussed with the soulmates. Valesca had volunteered nothing, her bearing remaining sullen and disrespectful throughout the proceedings, only speaking to curse Terreis' future and Melosa's memory. The inquisition had given way to a trial before the now unsympathetic council.

Valesca had maintained her silence when the shackle chains were set in a brazier. Her actual confession hadn't been heard until it had been forced from her as the trial by fire escalated. In the end, she'd screamed out her declaration of the plot she'd executed with the aid of a strange shamaness she'd met, after iron needles heated to cherry red had been forced under her fingernails. She was found guilty of a capitol crime whose dishonor was above that of murdering a sister Amazon and on par with treason.

Valesca had been summarily cursed and executed for regicide. The nation witnessed her vivimmolation. Her ashes were defiled and flung into the bottomless sinkhole at the far end of the Amazon lands. The warriors that Xena had seen associating with her had been required to swear fealty to the new queen and were watched for many moons thereafter until they'd proved themselves in battle. Xena and Gabrielle's relatively benign use of herbs on Valesca had never been mentioned, and it had actually caused the couple very little guilt under the circumstances.

For her part in revealing Queen Melosa's killer and defeating Alti, Queen Terreis had proclaimed Gabrielle a full Amazon sister and a warrior of the nation. Xena had declined the same honor for herself, informing the new queen that her patron god was Ares, not Artemis, and it would only lead to trouble. Terreis and Xena had understood each other well, and the queen hadn't pressured the God of War's Favorite. Instead, she'd offered Xena sanctuary on Amazon lands for life, and for many years the village had intermittently been the soulmates' home.

Now cloned Xena stood before her daughter's pyre. The oil had been consumed and the wood Gabrielle had so carefully stacked was fully involved. The youthful rage of the inferno had matured to an efficient blaze. As though her heart were one with the flames, Xena no longer seethed with suppressed rage and grief. Instead she reviewed everything Ares' vision had shown and everything he'd said during his visit.

Xena asked herself, why the Chakram of Day? Does it even still exist, and who was the goddess I opposed? I thought they were all long gone and Ares had only survived by bein' in that tomb. In his vision I was destined to change the world by endin' the reign of science. His parting words were, _"Ask yourself, what is Science?"_ So, what is science?

In the modern world, where mankind makes it's own choices and creates its own destiny, science is a tool, she answered herself. It's about testing ideas and understanding things usin' experiments and reason. The proof of the conclusions comes by repeatin' the results. It's a far cry from understanding the world through the visions of oracles an' the blabber of philosophers. That stuff was really only words anyway. Weather an' war were real. The gods were real.

Xena had grown up learning history that had later passed into myth. She'd accepted the existence of the gods long before she became Ares' Favorite. Their presence was something she couldn't refute and remain sane, for Xena trusted her own experiences. She had also dealt with the world of spirits and the magick of several cultures, and she accepted those phenomena as well, science be damned. The ancient world had been filled with evidence of the supernatural.

Natural and supernatural are just separated by what science can prove, she thought. Now everyone buys into science an' they don't really believe in anything else. Well, are they ever in for a surprise! People have always believed what they've convinced themselves to believe, myself included. I was pretty sure the world was flat, and I never woulda' believed about telephones or TV.

Since awakening in Alti's lab, Xena had come to accept science as a modern social trend, a parallel to what foreign trade, democratic government, or the rise of Rome had been in her time. They were things that could be changed by actions; cut off trade by causing hostilities between source and market, dissolve a senate and institute a monarchy, or replace one empire with another. To Xena, science was not an unassailable given or an absolute truth, but a product of the times. But what could she replace science with, magick, oracles, philosophers? Replace experiment with talk, and technology with craft? No, she couldn't see expunging science from the world. Its methods were valid. She'd used them often enough herself, testing weapons, strategies, and inventions.

Xena knew that even if she figured everything out today, she still wouldn't be able to just charge out and finish the job anytime soon. This wasn't like a fight with a band of cutthroats. It was the equivalent of a major campaign...probably bigger than her seizing half of Greece. It would require extensive planning, definite goals, and a workable strategy. It would require time. It would require technology and knowledge, as much as warriors, to win this battle. It would require...science.

The Warrior Princess heaved a sigh and blinked, then shifted her state of focus, reintegrating herself and consciously rejoining her surroundings. By the shadows she reckoned that two hours had passed since Gabrielle had curled up and fallen asleep, and though she'd made progress, she felt ready for a meal and a nap. Flexing her muscles in sequence from her extremities inwards, Xena finished returning her concentration to the world around her. With it came the sadness, the anger, and an unresolved longing for missed opportunities.

She took a last look at the pyre. The raging flames had settled down now that the oil was long since spent. The fire had progressed to a steady burn, dancing over a growing bed of coals. Almost no smoke wafted skyward among the shimmering heat waves that crowned the clean blue flames.

Like a person, a fire lives its life in stages, Xena observed philosophically as she so often had. From the tenuous infancy of a spark on smoldering tinder, to the boisterous conflagration of youth; the measured determination of adulthood, consuming its life's fuel, and leading to a lingering dotage of coals...then finally the cold death of ashes. Mortal, she thought, short-lived. So we must appear to the gods, so quickly consumed by the passions of our lives.

The shrouded body was no longer recognizable as a figure among the embers, and Xena whispered a final message before departing.

"Oh, Eve. Honey, I wish I coulda' been a mother to you, but you were taken from me again, though in a way, I'm glad ya didn't have to live in this world. I just hope your soul finds peace and happiness somewhere beyond the shadows of this life. Guess I'll be busy here for a while straightening this mess out, but I'll always love you, and maybe I'll see you again someday, on the other side."

Finally she turned to awaken her soulmate and return to their home.

"Gabrielle," Xena called, softly at first, noting a shift in the bard's breathing in response. She stopped a couple of paces away and repeated herself, a bit louder. "Gabrielle."

_(It was known that the Warrior Princess had trained her body to respond with lethal force when threatened while sleeping. That response functioned at the subconscious level as an acquired reflex. This ability often appeared on the TV show, and it has been mentioned many times in fan fiction as well. What was never shown in the series was that over the years, Gabrielle had taught herself the same reflex. It would have been a foolish risk to approach her stealthily as she slept. She was very quick, and she could apply the nerve pinch accurately by subconsciously "sensing" her target while still opening her eyes. For all practical purposes, she was as deadly as Xena herself in this situation._

_In what can only be considered an ironic twist, the bard had actually done this to a would be attacker who had tried to ambush the blonde in her bedroll while Xena was out scouting a Roman army camp. This had been in Italia in 56 BC, during the "Bloody Years". Not wanting to draw Xena's attention, the man had knelt to slit the bard's throat as she slept. Gabrielle had snapped into a state of semi-consciousness just long enough to apply the deadly nerve attack, and had then fallen back asleep when her senses reported that the threat was past. She woke up on her own two candlemarks later, face to face with a strange corpse. It had startled her witless and she'd reapplied the nerve pinch to the cadaver by reflex.) Editor_

After their years together, Xena knew that Gabrielle liked to "ease" into wakefulness, and with a basic consideration for her lover, she simply didn't want to startle her awake unnecessarily. Now Xena stood and patiently waited for her soulmate to awaken. Though neither of them had killed the other yet on those occasions when one would join the other already asleep in bed, this was a foreign setting, the bard had been exhausted, and Xena didn't want to chance having to catch her hands if she reacted. Besides, she wanted Gabrielle up, not herself snuggled around her partner on the ground.

Sure enough, the blonde reacted to Xena's voice calling her name. She unfolded her body and stretched, indulging herself in a luxurious yawn before taking a glance at the pyre, casting a quicker glance at the sky, and then meeting Xena's eyes. A smile of greeting shaped her lips as Xena moved closer.

"Hey," she said, "thanks for letting me sleep a couple hours. It really helped." She rolled to her feet and ran her fingers through her hair, then began crumpling the survival blanket into a ball. "Did you figure anything out?" she asked hopefully.

"Let's go back to the house," the cloned warrior said as she draped an arm around Gabrielle's shoulders and steered her towards their home, "we'll talk later."

The house had been deserted when they'd walked in through the kitchen door. They'd found a note from Danielle laying on the dining table, stating that she'd gone shopping with Karen Williams and would be back before class. The CWO had wondered where the soulmates had been, having not seen them the entire day before. Now she suspected that they were planning to disappear again. After griping about having a worrywart looking over their shoulders, Xena and Gabrielle had scarfed down a large breakfast, left the dishes in the sink, and taken a nap. Several hours later, the clones reawakened and sat down at their desks in the study to talk.

Xena related the details of the vision Ares had shown her. Predictably, Gabrielle had been horrified at the thought of a cloned army of Destroyers of Nations loosed upon the world. She also pointed out the fact that the vision implied "mission creep", having escalated from a quest for vengeance on Eve's cloners into a jihad against science. Xena acknowledged that the idea of suppressing a worldview as pervasive as science was unrealistic. The bard was relieved to know that her partner realized this, even if it appeared that the God of War didn't. The conversation continued, with Gabrielle incredulous and Xena exasperated.

"Xena, science has been developing and changing the world for thousands of years. It was at work long before mortals formalized it. I think it's inescapable because reasoning is a part of human nature. Besides that, a lot of what science has done is good. Now Ares believes you're going to change the world with one big battle, by fighting science with science? What's he thinking?"

"Change the world...ha! It ain't changing overnight, Gabrielle, even for me an' Ares. Science is too big. It's increasing knowledge and warfare. It's weaving body armor that swords can't cut and it's breedin' evil clones. It's that and all the other stuff that makes the modern world what it is. Kraken's milt!" Xena exhaled in frustration and stared at the ceiling, finally slumping in her chair and seeking a respite by closing her eyes.

Gabrielle sat and blinked. Words, in association and in combination, had always been important to her beyond the literal. Often they revealed deeper meanings than what had been intended. Now her soulmate's words sifted through her mind, filtered by the frame of reference of an ancient Greek bard who'd been schooled in the mythology of her time. As usually happened when she was on the verge of an uncomfortable discovery, the blonde chewed her lower lip and defocused her eyes while rolling the tidbits of information into a mental concretion, distilling and condensing it into a concept. This one was sure to give her an ulcer. Unfortunately, it also accounted for everything in Ares' vision, and explained everything that had happened to them since day one.

"Xena," she whispered, looking at her soulmate who was still directing her closed eyes up toward the canopy of parachute cloth, "I'm getting a really bad feeling about this."

The Warrior Princess didn't move. Usually Gabrielle was optimistic, but she was also quite capable of envisioning disasters. Xena knew how her partner's imagination could run rabid and border on the apocalyptic. What transpired in the dark crannies within the blonde's head sometimes created one of the few realms that was worse than their reality.

"Xeeena," Gabrielle repeated a bit louder. Now her fingertips were thrumming on the desktop in a plebeian's drum roll, "knowledge...sub wisdom, and warfare, and weaving. Does that sound like anyone you know...er...knew?"

Gabrielle's words actually caused Xena to groan out loud. Sure enough, the product of the bard's imagination was not only apocalyptic, it was worse than their reality had ever been. And once again, instinctually it felt true. _"Change the world...ha!" _ Xena thought. She might as well contemplate undoing the growth of agriculture by squashing a fig.

The warrior quickly asked herself, could _she_ really still exist? Xena answered herself just as quickly. If any of 'em besides Ares do, it'd most likely be _her_...count on it. It's the strong and the crafty that survive. It's ironic, damn it. Long ago I woulda prayed for her favor, but I was always more attracted to the passion and violence of war, the glory and the bloodshed. Ares was always more my style. It's all water under the bridge now anyway.

Xena of Amphipolis had been the most deadly warrior of her era. She had been the Destroyer of Nations, Ares' Favorite, and later, the Warrior Princess. In her time she had successfully waged war against the might of the Roman Empire. As a clone, she had the original Xena's decades of experience combined with a body in its prime. She had access to weapons that her original self had never imagined. It wouldn't be nearly enough.

Often she had been accused of being daring, reckless, and even insane, but she'd always judged her chances for success by her own abilities, not by what other mortals believed was possible. In doing so, she had seemed to defy both fate and common sense time and time again. However, even while in the possession of _katalepsis_, a part of her had gauged the situation against her resources and calculated the odds. Xena's clone knew that she was in no way equipped to wage a war against the Goddess of Wisdom, and yet her oath had committed her to just that. _"I will find them and I will kill them all."_ Unwittingly or not, she had sworn to exact her vengeance on Athena.

_Act, don't react, never become predictable, and accept no substitute for being prepared._ They were the most important lessons Ares had ever taught her. Now Xena would have to act unpredictably to be prepared. There was no doubt that her oath had been heard and all she could do was prepare for the battle ahead. It would seek her out as it had already been doing. Callisto and Mavican had attacked their school before the soulmates had infiltrated the lab in Georgia. The first Callisto had fought Gabrielle in the tournament back when they'd still thought they were the world's only cloned warriors. Athena had been on the offensive for months. Now Xena had no intention of waiting like a sitting goose for the Goddess of War's next move. The first step towards Ares' vision would be taken this very evening.

Finally Xena sighed and returned her attention to her partner. Gabrielle was watching her with uncomfortable anticipation.

"So what's the plan?" the blonde muttered by force of habit.

"First, we suspend classes at the school," Xena said. "There's no way we can endanger the students any further while this is goin' on. Second, we've gotta get to the mountains north of Issos. You remember the place, east of the Cilician Gates?"

"I remember. It was at the tip of a triangle with Issos and the Cilician Gates as its base. Xena, nowadays that's all part of Turkey. I doubt if Issos or the Cilician Gates are even remembered by anyone but a few historians like Ray. We have no way of knowing if the temple still exists. It's been over 2,000 years...."

"I'll deal with that, Gabrielle. The temple may not be standing, but what I need to find will be there. It was in the vision and a god doesn't have to lie."

"I'm going with you, you know."

With her simple words, Gabrielle had declared that she'd stand with her soulmate, even against a goddess. As in the past, there was no threat they wouldn't face together.

"Wouldn't have it any other way, Gabrielle," Xena said, giving her soulmate the widest smile she'd produced in two days. Despite all the modern world's changes, their devotion remained undiminished by the abrading sands of time.

For almost three decades, the bard had been a best friend, a loyal partner, and a fellow warrior, but compared to being the love of her life, those factors were almost superficial to Xena. Gabrielle was the focus of Xena's heart. Since rescuing the blonde from Draco's slavers in 72 BC, they had only grown closer over the years.

Unlike the events portrayed in the TV series, Gabrielle had never betrayed Xena, and throughout the warrior's life, she was the only one who hadn't. It was the love that they shared, the emotional entwinement of their hearts, and the symbiosis of their souls that gave the Warrior Princess the edge she needed to control the Destroyer of Nations. Violence was so deeply ingrained in her being that without her soulmate, Xena would have resorted to slaying as a reflex, whether in the service of the Greater Good or for her own gain. Being what she was, a child of war, Xena required Gabrielle's humanizing influence to offset her inherited asociality.

There should be no mistake about Gabrielle either. She had killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, with her own hands over the years. She was not the font of uncompromising idealism depicted on the TV show. That character would never have survived the life the pair had led, even with Xena protecting her. What the blonde did was unceasingly question the necessity of killing, and unfailingly feel some measure of regret for each life she took. It was this basic valuation of life, this intrinsic humanity that Xena constantly saw in her lover, that had initially drawn her to the Potidaean teen, and had kept her heart shackled to the Gabrielle's for the rest of her life.

Even the gods had not been immune to the attractions of mortals, craving some inherent trait or quality that mortality conferred, that short-lived, fleeting passion that immortals lacked. When combined with physical beauty, it fascinated and drew them, from Zeus on down to those of long-mingled blood, much like a green plant seeks Helios' caress with a vital compulsion. The old myths overflow with the tales of such liaisons.

In her relationship with Gabrielle, Xena found the warmth of heart that ameliorated the killer she carried inside; the curse that she bore in her very blood. In loving Gabrielle, Xena could find love for humanity in general and became more human herself. The bard brought out the best of mortal life that resided in Xena, and Xena inspired the bard to achieve what was believed to be impossible for a mortal. It would have been anathema to either of them to lose her partner. Both had been thankful in March of 44 BC, even while lying in their filthy cell in Rome, that they would die together and neither would have to live on alone. Their suffering on Caesar's crosses had been a trifle by comparison.

"I'll make the travel arrangements for us right away," Xena said, starting the computer.

"I wasn't just talking about the trip," Gabrielle replied, "I was talking about the war."

"Wouldn't have it any other way," the warrior repeated, turning back to face Gabrielle.

She leaned towards the blonde and found her movement being mirrored by her partner. Their arms wrapped around each other, unerringly finding the points that brought them into the fullest contact, in an embrace that was wholly second nature after a lifetime of loving. Xena brought her lips to Gabrielle's, softly at first, but then with increasing fervor. Their tongues met, caressing each other as their mouths opened, and the soulmates reveled in the sensations of loving contact, communicating the melding of their hearts. At first the women breathed ever so shallow through their noses to prolong the kiss, then took in air in gasps as the wave front of their intimacy enveloped them.

For a brief time they were alone together, submerged in that single place in the modern world that was the same as it had been in their own world 2,000 years before. Though everything else had changed, this precious place of sanctuary was inviolate and enduring. It transcended time and place and destiny. It was the one thing hinted at that the TV show had gotten right. The clones clung to it and to each other for many minutes, then finally they broke the kiss and held each other, foreheads together, arms entwined, simply absorbing each other's warmth and being. When they parted they were at peace despite what had come and what they faced.

"I'll take care of the students tonight, Xena," Gabrielle said, turning her attention to their Thursday night class. "I'd be willing to let them use the space to practice while we're gone, but I guess that wouldn't be safe either, would it?"

"No. Callisto and Mavican could come back anytime for some recreational slaughter, just because they can. I don't want anyone sufferin' 'cause our enemies exist again. If the place is deserted it'll leave 'em wondering what we're up to. We surprised 'em with the raid last night and we need to keep the initiative." Xena thought for a moment and then added, "I'll come to class with ya tonight. I owe the students an explanation this time, or at least an excuse."

**Continued in Chapter 2**

42


	2. CloneFic Part 3 Chapter 2

Clonefic

Part 3 Chapter 2

By Phantom Bard

**For Disclaimer**: See Part 3 Chapter 1

_Every move you make,_

_Every step you take,_

_I'll be watching you._

(_Partial lyric from, _**"**Every Breath You Take**", **_© 1983, The Police_)

_**November 8, 2001 - An Undisclosed Location in Washington, D.C.**_

"Harry, look at this," Albert Gibson exclaimed as he hurried into Harry Tasker's office. "Just came through the monitor on the Pappas' cable modem. They're traveling."

Harry took the printout from Gib and scanned the report.

"Two tickets to Ankara, via Atlanta, London, and Athens. Another flight from Ankara to Adana and then a commuter flight to Iskenderun. Room arrangements and a Jeep rental there too," he muttered. "What're they up to now?"

The agent sat in deep concentration for several moments, then turned to a terminal and called up information on Iskenderun. He found that the costal areas of southern Turkey hosted a combination of tourist and port/industrial cities nowadays, and Iskenderun was almost at the Syrian border. The Crusaders and Alexander the Great had come through long ago, and Alexander had defeated the Persian Emperor, Darius III, at nearby Issos, in 333 BC. He had founded the city itself, calling it Alexandretta. It had been centuries before Xena and Gabrielle's time. Harry needed information more specific to them."

"It's a damn shame that old Dr. Covington passed away," he said to Al, "she'd probably have an idea of what they'd want there."

"Well, Harry, I think I've got the next best thing," Gib told him with a wide grin. "Back when we were doing our initial research on the clones, there was a file on one of Dr. Covington's students. He was a loser who based his dissertation on her work. Lemme check some things and I'll get back to you."

"Sounds good to me," Harry muttered absently as he continued to stare at the screen.

Eight minutes later Harry's intercom came to life. It was Albert Gibson with his news.

"Harry, the guy I remembered is Dr. Raymond Fell, Ph.D., currently part owner of the Congressional Diner in Columbia, South Carolina. You want me to pick him up?"

Harry Tasker could barely believe that Janice Covington's one-time student had been so easy to find, or that he was haunting his old college town. He made a quick decision.

"No," he told Al, "we'll go talk to him. Meet me in five minutes with last night's mission video. I'll clear it with Spencer."

_**November 8, 2001 - Columbia, South Carolina**_

"What a classic," Harry commented to Al as they stood together on the sidewalk, staring at the Congressional Diner. The establishment was a pristine survivor from the 1950's, smoothly formed of gleaming stainless steel, and so absolutely faithful to the era that it could have been a movie set. Even the red, white, and blue neon on the name sign above the door, and on the trim above the windows looked authentic. The diner was both comforting and disturbing, possessed of a palpable Twilight Zone atmosphere, as though unsuspecting patrons might cross the threshold and find themselves trapped in the era of Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. Harry knew he'd stick out like a sore thumb, carrying his laptop. "Let's go in and have a cup of coffee," he suggested to Al.

It was early evening in Columbia, and the two agents had driven straight to the diner after landing at Owens Municipal Airport. The flight time from Washington, D.C. in the agency's Gulfstream V had been about two hours. Despite napping on the plane, neither man had gotten even three hours' sleep since the mission the day before. Coffee would help replace the bracing cool of the November night, prodding them to stay sharp. Harry pulled open the door and held it for Al, noting how smoothly it moved on its hinges.

Habit guided their steps to a rear booth near the counter gap and the door to the kitchen. Like Xena, Harry opted for the seat facing the entrance, leaving Al to sit facing the kitchen. Within moments, a remarkably cute girl had bounced out of the door, cocking her head at them as she approached their table. The waitress wasn't unfriendly, but she was obviously appraising them. It seemed that she was curious rather than suspicious.

"Hi y'all, I'm Angie," she bubbled with a slight Texas drawl, "ya look like you could use some coffee." She smiled, looking very much like Britney Spears at 17.

"Hello, Angie, I'm Harry, and this is Al," the agent said, returning her smile. He found the young waitress' pleasantness infectious. It was also refreshingly different from the somewhat cynical attitudes that some of his daughter's friends displayed. "Coffee would be a real life saver, thanks."

Angie grinned at Harry and asked, "light cream for you, right? Cream and sugar for Al?"

Both men nodded in surprised agreement and she bounded off, energetically swinging around behind the counter towards a large shiny coffee urn.

"It really is like the Twilight Zone in here," Harry whispered. "How'd she know what we take in our coffee?" Al shrugged in response, more interested in admiring Angie's trim figure as she walked off.

"We've got a real tasty pecan pie tonight," she tossed over her shoulder to them as she pulled a pair of mugs from a stack.

"I'll have a slice," Al easily agreed, "and bring one for Harry too...he'll grumble at first and then eat it."

When she returned a couple minutes later, balancing two mugs of coffee on saucers and two dessert plates bearing slices of pie, Harry decided to ask her about Ray.

"Angie, actually we're here to speak with Dr. Fell. I'm hoping he can help us with some questions we have about the Xena Scrolls that he once studied with Dr. Covington. Is he around tonight?"

Angie looked at them again, momentarily confused by the names, then cocking her head as she'd done earlier, before answering as she set down their silverware and napkins. "Well like, you mean Ray, right? He went out, but he should be back any minute. Why don't y'all hang out and wait for him and, you know, enjoy your pie?"

They were halfway through their servings when Harry noticed two women enter the diner, one black, the other white. They were chattering happily, obviously good friends, and the agent recognized them immediately. He tapped Al's shoe to get his attention as Angie passed their table to greet her newly arrived customers. From the kitchen came the sound of a door closing as someone entered through the back.

"Karen Williams and Danielle Lefferts just walked in," Harry muttered. Al checked them out in the window reflection next to him as they sat down two booths away. He recognized them from his surveillance of the Columbia School of Martial Science. "They're students at Xena and Gabrielle's school. This could get uncomfortable."

Sure enough, Danielle looked up and instantly recognized her next door neighbor. She waved to Harry, causing Karen turned around to see who it was. After a moment Karen recognized him from the Halloween party. "Hi, Harry," they called out in chorus.

"Hi, Danielle. Hi, Karen. How are you?" Harry responded, adding a wave of his fork.

He was saved from offering conversation when a late middle-aged man appeared out of the kitchen bearing a large carving knife. He was wearing a clean white apron and had a towel draped over his left arm. Despite being dressed as a cook, the man carried himself with a subtle air of self-possession and moved with unhurried precision. Both factors conveyed a measure of dignity more appropriate to a master chef than a diner cook. He gave the agents a glance, as he moved past them behind the counter to a chalkboard, on which he scrawled, "Congressional Home Style Meatloaf", in a calligraphic script at the bottom of a list of specials. Once finished, he turned to greet his two regular customers.

"Hello, Karen. Hello, Danielle. Will you be staying for dinner?"

Al deliberately controlled his movements as he turned his head, but his eyes bugged out at the sight of the man. His voice was cultured, low pitched, and sent a chill up both agents' spines. Not only was Dr. Fell a dead ringer for Anthony Hopkins, he also sounded exactly like the distinguished actor had in one of his most memorable roles. The large knife and culinary costume completed a real life portrait of Hannibal Lecter on a break. Perhaps his last customer had been rude and he'd just finished roasting her.

Al found himself wanting to ask the man to say, "Hello, Clarice," while wondering just what he'd cooked into the meatloaf. He grinned at the impulse, realizing it was a result of fatigue. In the meantime, the agent had missed the women's answer, but saw that Harry had gotten to his feet and walked over to the counter to talk to the man.

"Dr. Fell, I realize that you're busy, but I hope you can spare me a few moments," Harry asked. The historian was regarding the agent with some interest. Almost no one greeted him with his academic title anymore. In fact, almost no one knew that he held a Ph.D. Harry continued. "I need the benefit of your expertise, in particular, about the Xena Scrolls and the importance of Alexandretta to Xena and Gabrielle."

"Let me carve a couple of servings in the kitchen and I'd be glad to speak with you," Ray said. Almost no one asked about those scrolls anymore, at least with any sincerity or actual knowledge. Most of the people who had ever come to him about them had been fans, or writers for fan websites, looking for sensationalist tidbits. Ray didn't believe for an instant that this man's interest was academic, but he was articulate and polite and had asked a specific question. Ray had always valued the ability to properly phrase a question in order to get a specific answer. A question well asked revealed knowledge rather than ignorance. He gave the man a slightly lopsided smile and turned back to the kitchen, saying, "please indulge me and I'll return in a moment."

Harry nodded in agreement and walked back to his booth. A quick glance showed that Karen and Danielle were engrossed in their own conversation. That was a relief.

The agent retrieved his laptop from the bench seat and set it on the table, then picked up his fork and continued eating his pie. By the time he was done, Ray had come back out of the kitchen. He'd removed the apron, revealing khaki slacks and a comfortable argyle sweater with elbow patches. He joined them in their booth, setting down a carafe of coffee. Before starting their talk, he refilled their mugs and one for himself.

"Dr. Fell, I'm Harry Tasker, and this is Albert Gibson," Harry said. "I'm Serena Pappas and Gabriella Covington's next door neighbor. My interest is personal...I became curious about Xena and Gabrielle after meeting my neighbors and learning about the work their great aunts, Melinda and Janice had done."

"First of all, please call me Ray. I haven't gone by 'Dr. Fell' in over a couple of decades. Second, I can easily understand becoming interested in the history of Xena and Gabrielle. I always found it captivating myself...still do, actually."

"I've read the transcripts of the scrolls on the university's website, but some of the points elude me. In visiting Alexandretta, I'd wondered if they were retracing the steps of Alexander the Great. As fellow Greeks, it would have been inspiring, I'd think."

"So, that's why you're interested in Xena and Gabrielle's trip through Alexandretta, or modern day Iskenderun," Ray began. "That would have been in 63 BC, during their return from Indus." He sipped from his mug and regarded the two men with sharp intelligent eyes. "In fact, they had no intention of following in Alexander's footsteps figuratively or literally. Xena had renounced her activities as a conqueror a decade before, in part, because she had no intention of repeating his history."

"So their being in Alexandretta was coincidental? They were only there because it was on their way back to Greece?"

"No, not at all. Xena and Gabrielle almost always had a goal in their travels," Ray said. "At that time, their intention was to take possession of a very special weapon. You see, this story starts more than a thousand years before their time. Are you familiar with Greek history and mythology in general, Harry?"

"Some of it, yes, though I'm no expert," Harry admitted. "1,600 to 1,200 BC was the Heroic Age, while 1,100 BC would have been the tail end of the Mycenaean Age. The whole culture died out or vanished."

"That's how it appears," Ray said, realizing that although Harry wasn't ignorant, he didn't have the intimate knowledge of a scholar. "But in fact, that was the time of the Second Titanomachy...the second great war between the Olympian gods and the Titans."

Ray chuckled at the look of disbelief on the faces of the two men sitting across the booth from him. Like his old teacher, he'd come to accept the existence of the Olympian gods. What he'd learned of ancient history could only make sense in conjunction with that belief. In those times, many, many things had been different.

"You see, after his victory over Cronos, Zeus imprisoned the defeated Titans in Tartarus, yet after a time that Dr. Covington guessed was around 500 to 600 years, he granted them amnesty and set them free. Eventually, angered by her husband's dalliances with Io, Hera contrived to incite the Titans to rebellion. Zeus quashed that rebellion with the aid of Apollo, Artemis, Ares, and Athena. To arm them, Hephaestos forged the four chakrams, assigned to day and night, darkness and light."

"Four? Everything I've ever read only mention the two Xena combined."

"You have to read more carefully, Harry. When Xena became Ares' Favorite, he gave her the Chakram of Darkness, his own weapon. That would have been about 77 BC. In Indus, Xena accepted the Way of the Warrior, an ancient code of ethics much like the later samurai's bushido. It was on their way back from Indus that Xena took possession of the Chakram of Light and combined it with the Chakram of Darkness to create her Combined Chakram. This was in 63 BC. Now, if you read Janice and Melinda's expedition notes, you'll recall that in Ares' Tomb they encountered a broken chakram, an uncombined chakram. This is almost certainly the same chakram that Callisto used to defeat Xena in Rome, in 44 BC. In combat with Xena's descendant, Melinda Pappas, Ares showed no fear of it. Therefore, I believe that this was the Chakram of Night, Artemis' weapon, which Callisto took sometime after her escape from Shark Island Prison in 52 BC."

"So the Chakram of Day is unaccounted for, and in theory, Apollo's weapon could still exist?"

"In theory, yes," Ray agreed. He and Janice had spent years wondering about it.

For a while, Harry fell silent, digesting Ray's information along with his pie. 2,064 years ago, Xena and Gabrielle had gone to Alexandretta to take the Chakram of Light. Now it appeared that their clones were going to back, to Iskenderun, to take the Chakram of Day. Once again there was a goal to their travels. But why would they bother, and how could they know that it would still be there after all the intervening years.

"Ray, how widely known is the existence of the chakrams?"

"Oh, I suppose that while almost any well versed scholar could eventually understand what I've told you, almost no one would believe it. Like much of ancient history, it's regarded as myth, and therefore of suspect veracity. Most academics discount the existence of the chakrams...a significant portion of them discount the existence of Xena and Gabrielle as well. I know of no archeological expedition that was ever aimed at investigating the chakrams or where they came from."

"So then, who would believe in them enough to mount an expedition?"

At this, Dr. Fell stared at Harry Tasker in shock. After a few moments, he answered.

"Other than a few diehard fans of the TV show and myself, no one."

"Would Xena and Gabrielle have gone back?"

"Nothing in Gabrielle's scrolls indicates that they ever went back to Alexandretta. They were too busy; Xena's daughter was almost five years old when they returned from Indus, and three years later, Gabrielle gave birth to her daughter, Hope. The Romans considered Xena and Gabrielle enemies of the Republic and hunted them sporadically. The only time that I know of them having returned to Asia Minor was when they went to Pergamum to capture Najara, the Crusader, in about 61 BC. They never got within two hundred-fifty miles of Alexandretta then, and they were desperate to avoid the Roman legions of Pompey the Magnus."

"I see," Harry said. Again he fell silent, thinking. Finally he opened and turned the laptop towards Ray, then tapped a key to start the DVD player.

"Dr. Fell," he said, purposely using the archeologist's formal title, "what you are about to see must remain in the strictest confidence. It is nothing less than a necessity of national security. Divulging what you are about to see will result in prosecution with extreme prejudice." Anyone who had served in the military would understand this choice of words, and Harry knew that Ray had served in Viet Nam over thirty-five years before. "Although this is highly classified, I believe you will find it fascinating."

Ray gave Harry a hard stare and then focused his attention on the small screen. The footage was surprisingly clear, but had obviously come from a body mounted camera. It showed scenes that had been shot at night in what looked like a guarded installation. He could see the spotlights, and the high fences forming a perimeter in the background. Four figures were visible, and he realized that a fifth had been bearing the camera. All of them were wearing the black battle dress uniforms and gear of a covert assault team.

Two of the figures were male, bearing Heckler and Koch assault rifles, but it was the other two figures that drew his attention. They were distinctly female, the short one bearing a pair of ventilated short swords, and a taller one carrying a shrouded body on her shoulders. Ray gave Harry a momentary questioning look, but remained silent and then continued watching. As the group neared the inner perimeter fence, they were approached by a unit of US Military Police. For a moment there was a stand off. Some words were exchanged, and then an MP raised his rifle at the taller woman. The shorter woman moved in a blur, flipping entirely over her laden companion and attacking the MPs with her blades. She dispatched them in only moments, but a second company came charging towards the group, having seen the confrontation.

It was then that the taller woman had snatched something from her belt. While still carrying the corpse, she flung it sidearm at the approaching soldiers. The object crossed the intervening space in a heartbeat, split in two, and ricocheted among the troops, rendering them unconscious. The weapon had incapacitated the six MPs in only a few seconds, and then even more incredibly, the halves rejoined and returned to the tall woman's hand. A heartbeat later the scene was shattered by explosions. Light flared the camera lens, rendering the screen white. Harry stopped the DVD.

Ray was silent, sitting and staring at the blank screen, petrified in shock. A chakram had been used in combat in the modern world. It had behaved much as it had been portrayed on the TV show, though it had moved much faster. Harry looked at him and then past him at the movement of Karen and Danielle leaving their booth. He offered them a wave goodbye, and then returned his attention to the archeologist.

"I was there last night when this happened. The operative you just saw used a chakram against modern troops. Now she has arranged to travel to Iskenderun. You've led me to believe that she may be trying to recover the Chakram of Day. I need to know why. Please, it's very important."

Ray looked up and met Harry's eyes. He saw sincerity in them, and desperation. The man might be an amateur historian, but it was only to obtain background for his work as a covert agent. It was obvious to him that Harry Tasker and Al Gibson were spies. The two women were almost certainly the clones of Xena and Gabrielle that he'd met over a year and a half ago in the Puddingstone State Recreation Area, outside of Los Angeles. He hadn't seen them now in over a year. They'd certainly found their share of trouble in the meantime, just like the original Xena and Gabrielle. Last night, they'd fought their way past US Military Police, in what was almost certainly a secured American installation. Despite all that, one thing decided whether or not he would help; he believed that Xena and Gabrielle would not be aiding an evil cause. Ray tried to focus his mind on Harry's question, grasping for an answer. Finally an idea presented itself.

"It would be the only remaining uncombined chakram," Ray said, "and it is a 'bright' chakram. Remember that these weapons were originally created to slay Titans. In a god's hands, all four were fatal to immortals, but only the 'bright' chakrams give a mortal the capability of killing an immortal. They are as deadly to a god as to a Titan."

Now it was Harry's turn to fall silent. As a modern man, it was almost impossible for him to conceive of a need for such a weapon. There were no immortals. But...Xena and Gabrielle were ancients. They believed in the gods and the Titans. They would accept the need to possess a weapon capable of slaying them, and they knew where such a weapon could be found. Harry knew that sometimes when assessing a subject's probably actions it was more important to understand their motives than to judge their options logically. The whole field of profiling had developed because of that wisdom.

"Dr. Fell, in your opinion, hypothetically speaking, would Xena and Gabrielle have tried to recover the Chakram of Day because they'd intended to slay a god or a Titan?" Harry couldn't believe that he was seriously asking this question.

Ray's answer was just as incredible.

"I would say that it is the only reason they are going to Iskenderun. In fact, I can think of no other reason that they would consider a sufficient motive." He winked at the agent.

Again, Harry Tasker fell silent. Ray Fell had used the present tense in his answer, and by that, Harry understood that Ray knew that Xena and Gabrielle were currently living. So the clones believed that they were going to war with an immortal, and their immediate course of action had become clear. _Find me their enemies, Harry,_ Spencer Trilby had ordered. He was still working on it, but he needed sleep. The affair had taken on hallucinatory overtones and it was becoming more outlandish by the hour. Coffee wouldn't cut it much longer.

_Stay with me baby  
And that's all I ask of you  
And I know that someday  
You won't remember  
The way that this moment feels to you  
Don't let it go  
Don't turn your back on what you think you know  
You never know you know  
Don't leave it alone  
Cause I need you to cling to_

_Cause you are my kind  
You're all that I want  
Here in this life  
Until we are gone  
Our breath and our skin  
Our hearts and our minds  
They're one and the same  
You are my kind_

_(Partial Lyric from_, "You Are My Kind"_, ©2002_, _Santana)_

_**November 8, 2001 - The Columbia School of Martial Science**_

The class had been in session for half an hour. At the start of the session, the soulmates had told their students that they'd be making an announcement after the warm ups and stretching. For the last half-hour, cloned Xena and Gabrielle had been dreading the disappointment their students would feel when they revealed that the school was going to be suspended until further notice...again. Especially after having been back in session for only three weeks. Now the time had come. Gabrielle bit her lip and Xena grimaced as they called the students over to sit in a semicircle in front of them.

In a second story room across the street, a surveillance camera was recording.

The soulmates stared down at the expressions of anticipation on the faces of the six people seated before them and searched for the words to make their news understandable. For another moment they stared at each other. Xena shrugged. Gabrielle began.

"I'm sure you're all wondering what we're going to tell you now," the blonde said. It was a lame introduction and she knew it. She rolled her eyes as the words slipped out. "I guess the easiest thing to do is just come out and say it. Because of certain unforeseen circumstances, Serena and I have decided that it's necessary to suspend classes until further notice. We'll be leaving the country tomorrow...on business...and it won't be safe for any of you to be on the premises until after this business is taken care of." She stopped and glanced at the semi-circle of faces looking back at her in shock.

"This is about those two women that attacked you, isn't it?" Ronnie Chu asked. The others nodded in agreement, all of them curious.

"Yes it is," Xena answered.

"So, who were they? Why did they attack you?" This from Debbie Ryan.

"We really can't explain all this easily," Gabrielle answered, "and it may be better if you don't know. They are very dangerous...people...and the less possibility you have of contact with them the better."

"Just what's going on here?" Alexander Williams asked, using the not-really-a-question tone of a policeman. "Those women were out to kill you and they said some pretty incredible things. So did you. It's rather disturbing to know that those psychos are out there and that they could come back at any time. They would have killed an ordinary citizen. You two know about them, and I want to know just how much of a danger they pose. I'm worried about you, and if nothing else, they're a menace to the public. At that point, it's part of my job."

After that, silence descended on the group. Xena and Gabrielle mentally groaned while the students awaited their answer with rapt attention. This was better than Oprah. The cloned warrior looked at her soulmate and shrugged again, as if to say, "what the hell".

"Well ya see, it's like this," Xena began, "they're old enemies...."

"Really old enemies," Gabrielle interjected, and then bit her lip.

"...and they're out to settle some old scores," Xena resumed. "They attacked us here because it was convenient...semi-private, and with room for combat. I don't think they'll threaten anyone else unless they think they can get to us by doin' it. I don't expect 'em to go on a rampage and slaughter the public, Alex, if that's what you're worried about."

"It's a vendetta and we have to settle it ourselves," Gabrielle said. "But until we finish with this, it wouldn't be safe for any of you to be here, just in case they came back looking for us."

"You saw them," Xena added, "would you wanna face 'em by yourselves?"

"Hell no," Alex said, "but all of you were talking about things like they happened thousands of years ago and it just didn't make sense. There's more to this than a dispute between two couples that don't get along. And what was all that talk about thousands of dead? Anything that big would have been on the news." He paused to collect himself and then continued, trying to affect sympathetic concern. "Look, since that first day when Marcus and I came in here, I sensed that something odd was going on. It was mostly little things you two said, but then you started showing us stuff no one knows. Sometimes it seemed like you related to the past more than the present.

Then those two psychos showed up and suddenly it's like some twisted bit of history being relived. I know what your great aunts studied and I know about the TV show. Isn't this really all about the four of you being so immersed in that ancient reality that you feel compelled to act out? You're validating yourselves by living the anachronisms of heroes from the ancient world. It's an aggrandized form of role-playing that borders on delusion, right? Well, I suppose it's mostly harmless, until someone gets hurt. But now that's happened, and you've got to stop this. It's gone beyond fun and games and I think you need help."

At first the clones could only stare at Alex Williams in amazement. Xena was reminded of the FBI agents in Quantico, who'd assumed that she was a spy herself. Yup, people believe what they want to, she thought, no matter how ridiculous it is.

"Alex, this is far more serious than play acting," Gabrielle said. "As our most senior student, you can help most by watching out for the others. Don't worry about us."

"Yeah," Xena agreed, "the best way for you to help us is to stay away from here an' let us take care of it. Ya don't wanna get involved in this," she warned, "'cause believe me, you're nowhere near ready."

The teachers and their students were staring silently at each other in a contest of wills. Everyone was uncomfortable. Across the street the camera was recording the visual though it was too far away to record the sound. The standoff continued until the newly replaced front window glass shattered inward, spraying the room with shards.

Xena and Gabrielle had ducked and covered by reflex but the students were frozen in shock. Then everyone was scrambling. The students, oblivious to the minor cuts they'd received, were leaping up and tripping over their feet as they retreated to the back of the room. Xena and Gabrielle quickly stood side by side, facing the single figure that had stepped through the window frame and was pacing towards them.

This time their enemy was a stranger. An unfamiliar female warrior, she was as tall as Xena, just as powerfully built, and she moved with the habituated grace of a deadly predator. The soulmates sensed that this enemy was a prolific killer, confident and efficient and focused. Like Callisto and Mavican, she was dressed in black woven armor, but this time it formed a full _kataphractes, _covering her body from neck to toe in a figure-hugging, lightly quilted jumpsuit. She wore the same material covering her head, fashioned into a _kranos,_ whose design harked back to the Corinthian helms of the Peloponnesian hoplites. Over it, a bronze headband bearing the emblem of Medusa's head encircled her temples. Her face was hidden by the long nose-guard and wide cheek protectors, revealing only her dark eyes and her mouth, which was set in a grim line. Like the clones, she understood the menace that came with silence. She didn't speak as she continued towards the soulmates, but at about a dozen paces, she drew twin black-bladed longswords from scabbards crossed over her back.

"Get out the back!" Gabrielle yelled to the students in warning, "Now!"

The students began to move, but instead of starting for the back door as ordered, they moved to the weapons rack. The shock that had affected them when Callisto and Mavican had appeared didn't paralyze them again. Instead, it had been replaced with resentment. This time there had been no taunts or bragging, and their teachers didn't have their own swords. There was only one enemy, not two. Every student had been stung by their teachers' words of dismissal, and now they intended to be a part of this battle. Alexander Williams began handing out the weapons.

The inexperienced students thought that the odds were in their favor, for they outnumbered their enemy eight to one. To the soulmates, who didn't have the time to correct them, the six students were a liability who would have to be both protected and avoided in the fight. Xena and Gabrielle knew from long years of experience that a single warrior could prevail in this kind of engagement by using their opponents' numbers against them. The stranger was perfectly armed for that kind of fighting; her two long blades could preserve her personal space and threaten all quarters held against her. If anything, the stranger held the advantage since they didn't have their personal weapons.

"Keep her in the center," Xena ordered, "and don't let her get behind you. Attack in threes. Do not fight her one-on-one."

It was all the advice she had time to give. The students quickly encircled the stranger in a ring of swords, spears, and staves, forming a perimeter about a dozen paces across. Unfortunately, the stranger wasn't distracted by the students. She kept her focus on the soulmates and only gave the others her peripheral awareness. As she continued forwards, Xena and Gabrielle stood their ground and let her come.

Rather than backing up to maintain the circle's size, Ronnie and Danielle who flanked the clones remained at their teachers' sides, while Alex, Karen, Debbie, and Owen closed in behind the enemy. The circle tightened and the clones mentally shook their heads in exasperation over the students' inexperience.

At four paces the unknown fighter struck. She lashed out with both blades as she feinted right and then attacked to her left. Debbie and Owen hesitated for a split-second. They were disarmed and knocked unconscious in rapid succession after only a couple of moves. The stranger's recovery included a leaping spinning hook kick that dropped Karen Williams with a precise blow to the back of her head. The enemy controlled her landing with exquisite balance, planting both feet evenly like a gymnast while letting the impact coil her legs, and then she rebounded powerfully upwards.

She went airborne, somersaulting over Alex and leaving a long gash across his right arm with one of her swords. He jabbed at her with his spear and grazed her back, but the point couldn't penetrate her woven armor. At the same time, Gabrielle was backflipping towards the weapons rack as Xena leapt into a forward roll and recovered the sabre Owen had lost. The stranger engaged Alexander Williams with two swords against his spear. She was moving forward and driving him back as Danielle Lefferts joined him, brandishing a second spear. The two students worked together well, covering each other and forcing their enemy to defend as well as attack, but they were only buying their teachers time and they knew it. The stranger was moving too fast, she had too much practical combat experience, and she was a far more talented fighter.

Xena saw Gabrielle reach the weapons rack, and she smiled with approval when she saw her soulmate's choice. The blonde had snatched up the _gorytos_, slung it over her shoulder, and withdrawn the bow. The cloned warrior charged forward to join Alex and Danielle, hoping to buy Gabrielle the time she needed to prepare. As she came at the stranger's shield side she saw the blond already placing the _toxon_ against her foot and bending it to hook the string. Surprisingly, she had actually become a more proficient _toxotès_ than Xena, having spent long years practicing her archery with the Amazons. Xena had always had the chakram.

Danielle and Alex were retreating slowly towards the front of the school, giving ground and leading their enemy away from the fallen students and Gabrielle. Xena attacked the stranger from the other side, hoping to drive her in the same direction while taking some pressure off her students. She was only mildly surprised that this unknown warrior was able to fend her off with one sword while holding the two spears at bay with the other.

For a few moments the cloned warrior continued to probe her enemy's abilities, and then she accelerated her attack to her normal fighting speed. Her powerful blows came in a smooth and continuous assault, forcing her enemy to commit more attention to her than to the spear fighters on her other side. In the moments while she was adjusting her defense, Danielle slipped through the stranger's guard, jabbing her weapon forcefully into ribs exposed below the sword-arm that was raised to counter a high attack by Alex. The spearhead had struck cleanly, jerking the woman's body around, turning her partially away from Xena, but the woven armor didn't allow it to penetrate. Instead, the enemy went with the impact, rotating her body to shed the blow's force, and lashing out in a wide arc with both swords.

Her technique was flawless and she was moving so fast. The first blade sheared off Danielle's spearshaft a foot below the head as it withdrew, and the second opened a deep gash across the top of the CWO's left thigh, her leading leg. As she fell, the stranger continued her rotation to meet Alex. Xena leaped in from the other side scoring a slash across her back, yet the woven armor held again and she remained uninjured. Even so, the strength of the cloned warrior's blow broke the stranger's continuity and her first sword glanced off Alex's spear. The second blade whistled harmlessly a hand's width above his head and he jerked back away from the blade by reflex.

Xena moved forward and drove the hilt of her sword into her enemy's lower back, knocking her off balance. Had Alexander still been in position, he could have had her. Maybe even a direct thrust in the chest with his spear wouldn't have penetrated the armor, but the force of such a blow could have driven her backward onto her knees. It could have provided Xena with an opening to wrench her head back and cut her throat. Instead, she staggered a half step forward, recovered her balance, and then leapt into the air in a spinning move that would have brought both swords down against the cloned warrior.

The stranger was a yard above the floor, her leading sword extending, the second on the backswing. Her rotation was bringing the first blade to bear and Xena knew she'd barely get her own blade up to meet it. She expected the force of the blow to drive her off her feet since it was carrying her attacker's entire bodyweight behind it, and she intended to immediately roll out of range of that second sword. At the same time, she sensed the air compression of Gabrielle's first arrow crossing the space behind her.

The bolt passed within inches of Xena's left ear. The bard's shot was perfectly aimed, perfectly timed. With a resounding crack it shattered the bronze band that encircled the stranger's helm, tearing the entire _kranos_ off. The force of the impact slammed her head to the side. Her sword went off target as well, and Xena deflected it easily with the spine of her sabre. The stranger made a barely controlled landing in front of the warrior, despite having taken a heavy blow to the head. It should have stunned her or maybe even snapped her neck. Xena drove her left fist into the woman's belly with enough force to shatter a brick and it felt like striking a wall. The blow's only effect was to drive the air from her lungs with an audible huff before she straightened.

Then for a few heartbeats Xena was face to face with the stranger. She was definitely no one the cloned warrior had ever met in any lifetime. The woman's face held an aristocratic beauty, with planes strongly delineated by angular cheekbones, a widow's peak at her hairline, elegantly arched eyebrows, a straight nose, and generous lips over even white teeth. Skin that shone with health and vigor lay smooth and warmly tanned. Her eyes were as deep and ancient as a midnight sea, filled with power and mystery. Like her aunt's, it was a face that would have launched a thousand ships and driven kingdoms of men to war. That face was framed by a long fall of wavy hair, colored like fine dark chocolate, that hung below her breasts in a tight braid where it had flipped forward over her shoulder.

Xena, the daughter of an innkeeper from Thrace, had the distinct impression that she was confronting a woman of high noble birth; a princess or a queen perhaps, for this stranger possessed that intangible aura of aristocracy that a common born person of the ancient world would have viscerally recognized. Xena felt dismissal in the stranger's eyes, though the expression on her face remained neutral, set in a beautiful, cold warrior's mask as complete as her own had ever been. She would never have forgotten that face.

"Who are you," the Warrior Princess whispered without even hearing her own words.

The woman's return blow drove Xena backward off her feet. She hadn't even seen it coming. The stranger had telegraphed absolutely no intent and the strike had come so fast that she hadn't even been able to start clenching her stomach muscles. It had been years since Xena had been taken so completely, and she lay on her back willing the nausea and pain down so she could get back to her feet. The woman was moving again.

She turned as she ducked below the path of Gabrielle's second arrow, meeting the advancing Alexander Williams with a slash across the chest using the sword in her left hand. Then she turned back and advanced on Gabrielle.

Xena saw Ronnie Chu move between the stranger and her soulmate, armed with the sais Gabrielle sometimes used in practice sessions. He was standing only a couple yards in front of the blonde and slightly to her left. Gabrielle had knocked a third _toxeuma_ and had drawn as her enemy approached. She had chosen the weapon knowing that a fighter with a sword in each hand can't catch an arrow no matter how quick their reflexes. Her first shot had uncovered the stranger's head, providing a target. Now she intended to send this shaft into the stranger's eye from only a couple body lengths away, while the bolt was still accelerating from the bowstring, and when it would be hardest to avoid.

Xena lurched back onto her feet as the woman charged past her. She could see the potential disaster unfolding as she desperately tried to close the distance. Even if she screamed for Ronnie to get clear, he wouldn't be able to move fast enough. She charged after the stranger, but the woman needed only the heartbeats while she was still too far away. The enemy feinted to her left and Ronnie reacted by reflex to counter her movement, blocking Gabrielle's line of fire. And as Xena launched herself forward, the horror unfolded.

The woman took to the air again, leaping high and turning away from Ronnie. She hung in space as she drew in her arms and legs, almost motionless for a heartbeat, and then she snapped her hips into the turn to initiate a counterclockwise rotation that left her spinning fast. She lashed out with her right foot as she completed her first rotation, delivering a roundhouse kick that sent the student flying. Then, as her second rotation began, she deployed one sword outward like a scythe, it's slight mass only barely slowing her spin. Her long braid whipped outward as if counterweighing the extended sword, while she held the second sword defensively across her back. She was a blur, probably moving at eight revolutions per second, her technique displaying lethal perfection.

Almost as soon as she'd left the ground, Gabrielle had stretched her stance forward, lowering herself to become a smaller target and turning the bow sideways. She never let off of the tension on the string, keeping the arrow steady and waiting to reacquire her target, but with the bow held horizontally at waist height she couldn't sight down the arrow's shaft. It would be like firing a sidearm from the hip at a major league fastball. When Ronnie Chu obscured her line of fire, and she'd been forced to hold fast. She was still waiting for a clear shot when the blade came down from above the bow and slashed her neck. Almost as an afterthought, she released the arrow. It impacted on the woman's collarbone, deflected harmlessly off her armor, and lodged in the nearest wall.

The stranger's feet hadn't even touched the ground when Xena tackled her around the calves with both arms as she extended her body fully in a flying leap. The two women crashed to the floor, landing hard only a body length from the stricken bard.

Xena went berserk. She crawled up the stranger's body, clinging to her with clawing fingers, pummeling her with both fists, and finally slamming her in the face with her forehead so hard that she herself saw stars. She used knees and elbows, staying too close for her enemy's swords to be of much value, shrugging off the blows that rained on her in return, and venting the madness and rage of her protective instincts for her soulmate. She barely remembered a bit of it afterwards, but at some point she managed to disjoint the woman's left elbow with a satisfying crack. It only ended when the stranger smashed Xena's left hand between the floor and the pommel of the sword in her right hand, and then backhanded her solidly with the hilt, leaving her dazed. She staggered to her feet.

For a moment she stood unsteadily, bleeding over the cloned warrior, and then Ronnie Chu jumped her like a madman, screaming hysterically and raining a flailing whirlwind of undisciplined blows on her with the sais. He blocked her sword twice, mostly by luck, then laid her cheek open with a wild slash, and finally she retreated, crashing into the weapons rack before fleeing the school and disappearing into the night. Ronnie dropped his weapons, crumpled to his knees, and promptly threw up.

Cloned Xena scrabbled across the floor to where Gabrielle lay still, near the upended weapons rack. She had no idea how much time had passed since the blonde had been wounded, or even how badly she'd been hurt. Seeing the stranger's sword slash across her partner's neck had made her snap inside, and only now, after the fight was over, did she begin to come back to her senses. She dimly registered pain in her hands and looked down. Her right thumb was dislocated, and the first two knuckles on her left hand were laid open so that she could see the bones. Vaguely, she noted several bruised or broken ribs as well. She grabbed her disjointed thumb and forced it back in place, then blocked the rest of the damage out as much as she could and kept moving, crawling over and finally collapsing next to her soulmate.

At a glance she could tell that Gabrielle was badly hurt. The neck wound was pumping weakly and her skin was pallid. When she rested her hand on the blonde's forehead she found it clammy and all too cool to the touch. The bard was suffering from shock and severe blood loss.

"Gabrielle..." Xena croaked through swollen lips, half question and half plea.

The bard's eyes were slow in shifting to her face and even slower to focus. The warmth of recognition in them was quickly fading. In the distance there were sirens wailing.

"Xena?" Gabrielle's whisper was airy and weak, "...never saw her before...don't want to leave you..."

"I'm not letting you go!" Xena choked out in desperation. She found that she could no longer see clearly. She blinked angrily, but still didn't suspect tears. "I won't let you go!"

Somehow Gabrielle found the strength to give her frantic lover a sad smile.

"...so lucky to have found you again..." she whispered, "...so happy to have a little more time, love...cold now...going."

"Oh, Gabrielle, no. If you go then I'm coming with you. You know I'd rather be on the other side with you than livin' in this miserable world alone. I'll meet you there...I'll...I need you..."

"No," Gabrielle said with surprising strength, "no, Xena, not yet...still a battle to fight... now I know why I...I wasn't in Ares' vision..."

She gasped and closed her eyes; her breathing labored and shallow. Blood was barely pumping from the neck wound anymore. She knew this feeling...Caesar, the cross, the darkness calling, enveloping her in its silken cradle. She felt so light. Just one last moment in the world...

Xena leaned down and brought her lips to Gabrielle's one last time, revisiting the kiss they'd shared on that Ides of March before being separated for their crucifixions. Her outpouring of love and anguish met with the last traces of its counterpart as the bard's soul left her body. For a blessed moment Xena's clone felt herself enveloped by a warmth she had never felt in any life, a pure embrace of the spirit that held her with care and love in such measure as to overwhelm even the heritage of the blood she'd been born with. And then it fled to the next world, leaving the warrior with only a shocking cold emptiness that rang with loneliness and despair. Her heart felt hollow in the wake of its passing; just the vacant shell of some dead sea creature, stilted, hardened, and beyond hope, a husk that would never realize its potential in this life and existed now only as a receptacle for sediment.

In the heartbeats before she raised her head, everything that had changed when she'd found the dead clone of her daughter was reinforced, and more besides. Within Xena's clone, the hungry void that Gabrielle's love had left in her heart began to fill with the fire in her blood, her soul desperately needing to somehow fill the vacuum. The humanity and warmth that being in love had conferred, in sharing both the receiving and the giving, were sloughing away like a snake's shed skin, until only the most tenuous link remained. Now her wounds were nothing. This modern world was nothing. She no longer saw the injured students or the damaged school. She no longer heard the sirens.

She lifted Gabrielle's body as she'd lifted her daughter's body the night before, stopped only to retrieve the cowl her soulmate had shot from their enemy's head, and walked away from the school, heedless of the tears drying on her cheeks. On the street she ignored the sirens and flashing lights as the police cars raced past her. In their haste, they ignored her as well. Xena paced the mile back to the house in silence, undisturbed and in a state of shock. She didn't stop until she was again standing in the clearing on the Pappas estate, where the remains of Eve's pyre still lay unscattered but cold. That she had borne Gabrielle's body all that way didn't register at all. She felt no fatigue. Physical sensation had been blunted by her will, by her blood. Somewhere along the way, her ribs had ceased to bother her.

Over the next half-hour Xena raised a pyre for her soulmate using all the remaining stacked wood. It would burn for hours; rising into the night with an intensity that she hoped would be visible on Olympus half a world away. She had no oil but it wouldn't matter. Kindling was abundant in the clearing. Xena lay Gabrielle's body down with the _kranos_ below her feet but said no farewell, then she lit the pyre and watched the creeping flames engulf the logs, wrapping the body of her beloved bard as if in the blanket of her love. Xena's clone stood silent, for once not singing the requiem, but simply stroking the lock of Gabrielle's hair that she had cut, endlessly through her fingers.

Sometime during the pyre's life, as its hungry flames rose and fell, the last of cloned Xena's human warmth burned away as well. The last of the bond that she had shared with mortals through her love for Gabrielle stretched thinner and thinner until finally, with the pop of an ember, it sundered.

Never before her death in Rome had she freed her will so completely. In doing so now, she became, not unleashed, the Destroyer of Nations, embracing her not just long enough for a fight, nor in the monitored way that she had when she intended to recage the beast. In the ancient world, the Destroyer of Nations had lived to achieve ambitions of which self-preservation had been an integral part. Now Gabrielle was gone. This was not her world. She was adrift with nothing to ground her save the coming conflict with Athena. In this life, there was nothing left for her but vengeance. Now the modern world would see a Destroyer of Nations that the ancient world had been spared; one who sought to build no empire, relished no conquest, and had no intention of living beyond her revenge. She would take the fated path of destiny that had been lost to eternity over two thousand years before.

Hours later, with the first crescent of the waxing moon slipping by overhead, she whispered to the crackling flames a formal _Sacramentum Bellicus_, with all the stars in the heavens as her witness.

"By all the gods still living, and all of those long dead, I shall bring destruction on my enemies and I shall see their blood flow. Upon the livin' and the dead, and those of immortal blood, I shall visit my wrath in vengeance for the wrongs done at their hands. May the gods hear and bless my deeds."

The words were barely uttered before the familiar blue light flared into the clearing. Before her stood Ares, her patron god. He looked at her for long moments before he approached, and when he stood beside her, he raised her left hand. The gash across her knuckles that had shown down to the bones only hours before was already closed and pink with new-grown flesh. A slight gasp escaped her. She hadn't bothered to tend it. Despite having always been quick to heal, never had the process of regeneration moved so rapidly. She looked up in question at the God of War and he explained.

"You have freed yourself from old constraints, Xena," Ares said, "and now your true potential reveals itself. The blood in your veins can only exercise its full virtue in concert with your will. Through your loss, at least something was gained." Surprisingly, his voice was wholly devoid of gloating or satisfaction. What had transpired this night, awaited for millennia, was far too grave a change to demean with ego, even his.

"So it's true?" Xena dispassionately asked. Always a suspicion yet always in doubt, her parentage had been a question that she'd mostly tried to ignore. Wondering about it had had no practical value, and knowing the answer would have made no difference in the past. Now, knowing her potential had become strategically important. "The blood of the gods runs in me."

"You are a child of war," Ares answered decisively. "You have never before embraced your birthright. Do you accept it now?"

"Yes. I accept it and I ask for your Blessing on my campaign," Xena answered just as decisively. Anything that would have stopped her lay dead in the past. "I prepare to fight Athena and her forces, whatever they may be."

"Then you have my Blessing, Favorite," Ares said as he briefly leaned forward and gave her a soft quick kiss. He pulled back and told her, "but now there's a lot to do. Expect trouble from the modern world at the start, but I don't doubt that you'll be victorious in the end. You'll also have allies in your fight." Before she could continue, he cocked his head towards the house, and when she projected her senses, she heard people moving towards them. "Some minor trouble is coming, but your allies will assist you."

Ares flashed out of sight and Xena waited by the pyre, silently watching the flames. Five minutes later a dozen Columbia policemen surrounded her. They asked her questions and she stared at them as if they were speaking a foreign language. They insisted that she accompany them and bound her hands with shackles she knew she could snap with a twist of her wrists. When she saw that they weren't going to try to put out the pyre, she went with them, got into their car, and went to the station. They sat her in an interrogation room and spent the rest of the night asking more questions. During the entire time, she looked at an imaginary point somewhere behind them and said nothing. The Destroyer of Nations was busy premeditating war.

_**November 9, 2001 - Columbia, South Carolina**_

Columbia Municipal Police detectives Mark Castors and Virgil Polick stood in the hallway outside interrogation room #3, sipping cups of bad coffee. Castors and Polick were tired and frustrated. They'd spent almost five hours in a marathon questioning session and had yet to get any kind of response from their subject, Serena Pappas.

Just a week before, they'd questioned her under much more cordial circumstances, concerning the prior invasion of the karate school she ran with a partner that several witnesses claimed had been killed in the previous night's attack. Last night, the witnesses stated, a lone female stranger had entered the premises and begun assaulting the occupants with a pair of swords. Their account of the events had been outlandish, and the body of the teacher they'd reported killed had yet to be found. It had last been seen in Serena Pappas' arms as she'd left the scene of the crime.

Patrolmen hadn't found either woman at the couple's home and had only later discovered the Serena Pappas deep in the spacious backyard, standing beside a bonfire that looked suspiciously like an old time funeral pyre. It had already been burning for many hours by then and no bodily remains had been visible at that time. Still, the woman hadn't been cooperative since. She'd sat silent and unmoving, as if deep in shock, blankly staring straight ahead, and for all practical purposes, ignoring them.

"She's a basket case," Castors muttered, "and this coffee sucks." He stuffed the half-full cup into a bullet can standing a few paces down the hall.

"I think she knows stuff," Polick said with certainty, "she's a hostile witness, maybe she's even involved somehow. Did the Covington woman have life insurance?"

"We're checking that," his partner said, "and looking over their estate. You know that at one time her family owned most of the land Columbia sits on? Anyway, prelim looks like they shared the inheritance equally."

"Maybe it was a crime of passion."

"Maybe...she certainly seems unstable now," Castors claimed, "but the students said they were fighting together against the assailant...it doesn't add up. No, I'm guessing traumatic grief. We've just gotta get her talking."

"Maybe we should try harder," Polick suggested, "be a little more forceful...."

Mark Castors looked at him for a moment, somewhere between disbelief and disdain.

"You heard the students," he said, "she dragged down that woman and pummeled her with her bare hands, and that after the woman had been cutting up the others with those swords. You want to get killed and then have to face a lawsuit for brutality? Next there'd be an IA investigation. Hell with that. Anyway, she's loaded...old money. You know how that works. It's not worth it."

"So what do you suggest?" Polick asked. "Give her sympathy and understanding? Do a touchy feel-good interrogation? Get a shrink? Bake some cookies?"

"No. We wear her down, keep her awake, no water, no rest breaks, no getting out of that chair until she talks. Maybe we can play on her conscience or her grief. We'll get her to talk eventually. Time's on our side."

Even as he said the words, the detectives heard a commotion in the station's reception area. There were loud voices, one of them the captain's. Out of curiosity, the pair walked out of the hallway and stood in the day room where they could see the goings on.

Two men in dark tailored suits were talking with the captain. They were sharp looking enough to be either Feds or mobsters. In the reception area behind the men, they counted eight Special Services officers in black BDUs, all armed with HK MP5s. The men wore Kevlar helmets and full assault gear. Definitely Feds then, and deadly serious, they decided. The detectives moved closer so they could overhear the conversation, but the captain spotted them and made the effort moot by waving them over.

"Detectives Castors and Polick, these are agents Phillips and DeMarco of the FBI," the captain said. "They're here to take over the Pappas investigation and transfer the suspect to their facility." He consulted a sheaf of official papers and specified, "You're to hand over the 'witness', any physical evidence, all the files, all your recordings, and any other pertinent information pertaining to last night's incident, and the incident of November 2nd. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir," the detectives said in unison, their relief at dumping the case outweighing their resentment at this Federal Bureau intrusion. They could be done with it in time for a long Friday lunch break. The detectives suppressed matching smiles.

They looked the agents over. One was in his mid-forties with rounded facial features and a slight paunch, the other appeared to be about the same age, with chiseled good looks and a solid muscular build. The two agents returned their gaze evenly, all business. They were obviously field personnel, not desk jockeys.

"If you'll direct me to Serena Pappas, agent Phillips here will gather the evidence," the stocky agent said with a slight European accent. "I'm sure we can transfer the subject without difficulty." He gestured to the Special Services officers, using a series of hand signs. Four of them broke off and approached, falling in behind him.

"I'll show you to the room where we're holding Ms. Pappas," Detective Castors offered. He turned to face his partner and asked, "Virgil, would you pull the case files from records, and get what we have on the desk?" Detective Polick nodded his assent and led the other agent away to get the paperwork.

Mark Castors entered interrogation room #3 and found Serena Pappas just as he'd left her. She hadn't moved. He sat down and explained that she was being released into the custody of the FBI, and that she was to accompany one Agent DeMarco who was waiting outside. There was no reaction. He sighed and got up to leave. At the door, he signed some paperwork for the transfer and briefly whispered to the FBI agent.

"She's in there, and I'd say she's almost catatonic. Hasn't said a word all night. I'll go and get the tape recordings. Hope you have more luck with her than we have."

Even when Harry Tasker entered the room, the FBI ID badge hanging from the pocket of his suit jacket, she only gave a slight twitch of her left eyebrow in recognition. When the four Special Services officers surrounded her, she got up and followed them out in silence. Within minutes, Harry rejoined them, carrying a stack of cassettes. As they walked through the reception area and out into the chilly morning, they passed a pair of patrolmen coming in off their shift. The cops gave them only a passing glance of curiosity and boredom as they headed to an extended black van. Shortly later Al and the other four operatives joined them, carrying a box holding bagged evidence and folders of notes. As they drove away, Harry and Al tossed their FBI IDs into a briefcase.

Back in the police station, one of the recently returned patrolmen was lounging at a table with a cup of coffee. He noticed Detective Castors passing by and questioned him out of idle curiosity, hoping for a tidbit of gossip.

"So what did that DEA agent want with the Pappas woman?" The patrolman asked.

"Whatcha mean DEA?" Detective Castors asked. "The captain said those two suits were FBI. That's what their IDs said...Special Agents Phillips and DeMarco."

"Two agents? Well, the big guy I just saw showed up with his muscle at the school last week and searched it for evidence before you guys got there with the CSI," the officer told him, "so last week at least the big guy was DEA." After a moment's thought he wondered, "unless they change departments really quick up there in Washington."

"Or unless we've been had," Castors said, looking towards the door as if he'd catch a glimpse of the long departed black van. Finally he turned away and dumped his coffee cup into a nearby bullet can, muttering, "this coffee sucks."

The black van drove directly to Owens Municipal Airport, where Harry Tasker and Albert Gibson took the evidence and led their "prisoner" to their agency's Gulfstream V. The Special Services officers drove off in the van. A quarter-hour after leaving the police station, the jet was in the air, headed for Reagan International Airport in Washington, DC.

_Wish that I could cry_

_Fall upon my knees_

_Find a way to lie_

_'Bout a home I'll never see_

_It may sound absurd_

_But don't be naive_

_Even heroes have the right to bleed_

_I may be disturbed_

_But won't you concede_

_Even heroes have the right to dream_

_it's not easy to be me_

_Up, up and away, away from me_

_Well it's alright_

_You can all sleep sound tonight_

_I'm not crazy or anything_

_(Partial lyric from "_Superman", _Recorded by Five For Fighting)_

_**November 9, 2001 - Airborne**_

Aboard the private jet, Harry and Al ushered Xena to one of the four mid-cabin seats surrounding a small conference table. They took two more of the seats for themselves and placed the briefcase on the fourth. Now that they were safely in the air, with neither the Columbia police nor their own operatives nearby, they could frankly discuss recent events. Since last seeing her after their mission, many things had changed.

"We're taking you to our headquarters, Xena," Harry said, "things have progressed so far that I think it's time we pooled our resources."

Xena said nothing, and though she was listening carefully, she continued to stare out the cabin window next to her seat. Far below them lay Columbia. The home where she'd briefly shared her recreated life with her soulmate dwindled in a distance composed of both space and time. Even if she returned to the Pappas house there would be no homecoming; Gabrielle was gone and the rooms would feel empty, the walls cold.

A whisp of cloud interposed itself, obscuring the landscape below. For a moment she pondered, is this how the gods see us an' our world? Is this how _she_ sees us? Small, distant, an' insignificant; a toy world on which to impress her will?

"There are a lot of things we've found out since the mission," Harry continued, "and I think there are a lot of holes you can fill in. The black body armor is made of spider silk from genetically engineered goats. We don't know how the Livia DVD from the cloning lab was filmed. We blew up the lab but we never caught the people responsible. I know finding Eve's body hurt you, and then when we learned that Gabrielle had been killed.... Xena...?" He paused, noticing that she hadn't responded at all. Harry watched her. He saw her blink once, and then slowly turn her head to face him.

"Have you any idea at all about what you've become involved in?" She asked.

Her voice was cold and almost without expression, but her gaze had taken on an intensity that pinned the agent to his seat. He met her eyes and found his world focused on them alone, his peripheral vision narrowing down to a tunnel, excluding the cabin. The muffled roar of the engines faded. It was a timeless place whose boundaries were demarcated by her personality. He became intensely aware of his breathing, the sudden dryness of his mouth, and the beating of his heart. Harry Tasker had seldom felt such a demanding presence, and he had long since become immune to personal magnetism. Next to Xena, Albert Gibson sat equally enthralled.

"Everything ya know is insufficient to prepare you for the battle ahead," Xena said, "all your technology and tactics won't save the world, 'cause you're facing an enemy that no one in this world believes in. Even your greatest army with their most powerful weapons can't harm her."

"That's why we need your help," Harry said, surprised that he could speak at all after hearing what she'd said. After what he'd seen on the disc, and what he'd seen on the surveillance recording, he couldn't discount her claims completely. "We don't know..."

"No." Xena's voice had sharpened. "That's why _I_ need _your_ help. I need your peoples' resources, nothing more. _I_ will fight the battle..._this_ enemy is mine."

"Xena, you can't fight an enemy like this alone. We can give you weapons and intel. We can provide support anywhere in the world, but we don't have large numbers of troops. At some point we'll have to bring in outside assets...."

Xena heard what he said, but her attention slipped to the edgy sensation she felt running across her skin. It was like the tingling precursor to an electric shock, when a body becomes a charged pole counterpoised to its environment. The cabin was not secure and they were not alone. With the infallible sense that she had always enjoyed, the warrior shifted her attention to a seat across the aisle at the front of the cabin. Its back was to her, but as she watched, it swiveled around revealing the God of War. She gave Ares a slight nod of acknowledgment. Harry took a quick glance in the direction she'd looked and having seen nothing, returned his attention to her. Her eyes awaited his truant focus.

"You're right, Harry," Xena softly conceded, "I can't fight a war against this enemy alone." And then her voice lowered to the tone of uncontested command that had once ordered a few thousand fighters to conquer half of Greece. "_You_ will build me an army."

Harry could only stare at her in drop-jawed amazement. At the same time, he felt the reflexive impulse to comply. This was not the woman who had bolted across her yard, dodging her car and leaping a hedgerow, to confront him about his motorcycle on moving day. In all his life the agent had never faced a will so dominating, so imperious, or so utterly compelling. Across the table, Albert Gibson was unconsciously nodding his head in agreement, already completely bewitched.

"How?" He whispered.

"We fight fire with fire, Harry. You already know what I am, and ya know what Eve was." Again her glance momentarily strayed to the seat at the front of the cabin. "You take the cells from me and grow 'em. I know you can figure out how it's done. I need 8,000 clones. I need the woven body armor for 'em. I'll handle the weapons and trainin'."

Harry Tasker could only groan. Yes, it probably could be done...eventually. Yes, such an army would be devastatingly lethal. Yes, the strategy was sound. And it was the scariest proposal he'd ever heard. What he knew about Xena and Gabrielle told him that such an army would be genetically enhanced, capable of being trained to a level unattainable by regular troops. After what he'd just experienced in the past few minutes, it was obvious that they would be inspired by a personality that would make the charisma of Hitler or Kennedy seem like a shallow pantomime.

He remembered the files he'd read; at 17 she had led a band of farmers to defeat a warlord, at 19 she had almost conquered Corinth with only 800 men. At 20 she had captured Julius Caesar. At 24 she had held Thrace, Chalcidice, Macedonia, and half of Thessaly and Euboea. It had taken almost 80,000 men to defeat her 6,500. She had gone on to battle the Roman Empire and wrest her prize from Caesar himself. And along the way she had slain tens of thousands. For a moment he thought of his own daughter; Dana would be 17 in a month, and she was nothing like Xena. To loose 8,000 like her would jeopardize the world like nothing else he could imagine. In a few years there would be neither checks nor a balance of power.

"There is no other way," she told him, addressing the misgivings she could sense in his mind, "no matter what you want to believe, you are fightin' a goddess, and that goddess is cloning her own army. They'll be psychopaths like Callisto, Mavican, Livia, Valesca, and another fighter I don't know who's deadlier than any of the others ever were. She killed Gabrielle...."

For a brief moment, emotions flickered in her cold eyes; pain and loss, and anger. All of it was quickly suppressed; gone in a heartbeat.

What she'd said dovetailed precisely with what Dr. Fell had told him. Xena intended to kill an immortal, a goddess. The agent lifted his briefcase to the table, thumbed open the locks, touched a hidden switch to deactivate an explosive, and withdrew a set of prints from a folder.

"These are from a camera that was watching over your school last night," he said as he handed over the photos, "maybe they'll help."

The cloned warrior leafed quickly through the prints. They were clear, close-up, 8X10s of the strange woman who had invaded the school the previous night. She held them loosely in her hand as she watched the God of War pacing towards her down the aisle, reaching out and offering her his hand. When he reached them she rose to join him, then leaned on the table with both hands, recapturing Harry's eyes.

"Thanks, Harry," Xena said, her voice softening slightly to convey her trust, "You know what you have to do. The world's depending on ya, and so am I." Then her demeanor hardened again to that of the uncompromising Destroyer of Nations, "You have four years...I'll be checkin' on you."

The agents saw only a momentary flash of blinding blue light, harsh like a raw electric arc. Their eyes slammed closed in a reflex reaction, and when they opened them again they were alone in the cabin. Xena was gone.

Harry leapt to his feet and ran forward to the cockpit where he burst in on the pilot and copilot. They jerked around, shocked by his frantic entrance. The plane gave a lurch and dropped a stomach heaving two hundred feet before the pilot steadied the stick. Braced in the doorway, the normally cool agent was practically foaming at the mouth and they had never seen him so upset.

"Turn this plane around now," he yelled, "we're going back to Columbia!"

_**November 9, 2001 - Columbia, South Carolina**_

With a flash identical to the one aboard the Gulfstream, Xena and Ares reappeared in the study at the Pappas house. In the parlor at the front of the home, they could hear the TV tuned to _All My Children_, and more softly, Danielle's muffled sobbing. The cloned warrior walked over and sat at her desk, gesturing for Ares to take the chair in front of it as she unlocked and searched the drawers. Passport, cash, maps, and her reservations for Iskenderun, she jammed them all into a belt pack. The cloned warrior took a few moments to scrawl a note to Danielle, just to let her know that she was welcome to stay, and to look after the house for a while. Xena had no idea when or if she'd be back. Finally she took a breath and stopped, and then looked down at the photos Harry had given her. She slid them across the desk.

"Who is she, Ares?"

Xena looked up from the print of the woman who had devastated her school and sought the eyes of her patron god. The top photo showed the unknown warrior, dressed in her black woven body armor, captured in a frozen instant while gracefully executing a spinning slash as she flipped through the air. The rotation of her body had been as fast as an Olympic figure skater performing a triple Axel. Centrifugal force had caused her long braid of dark hair to lash out in the direction opposite her extended blade, while she held an identical second sword tucked against her body in a defensive position across her back. Her face was slightly blurred by the speed of her movements. The God of War took only a heartbeat to identify the subject.

"Elainis of Mycenae." His expression was dark with apprehension.

The name wasn't familiar to the cloned Warrior Princess. She shot him a questioning look, prompting him to continue.

"1,150 years before your time, King Agammemnon of Mycenae had three children, two daughters, Iphigenia, and Elektra, and a son, Orestes. Agammemnon was determined that Mycenae's rule would remain in his line, so he trained both Orestes, and his elder daughter, Iphigenia, as leaders and warriors. Iphigenia was Helen's niece and shared her looks, but she also had her father's will and prowess. She was a contemporary and friend of Achilles, Ajax, and Odysseus. She was their equal, but she never fought at Ilios.

You probably know Agammemnon as the Greek's _strategos hypatos_ in the war against the Dardanians. Before sailing his ships to Ilios, the armada was becalmed and he was commanded to sacrifice Iphigenia to Artemis. Though he prayed to the gods, he ended up having to trick his queen, Clytemnestra, into sending their daughter to Aulis for the sacrifice. Well, the sacrifice was made and Artemis was appeased, but Athena saved Iphigenia, whom she'd long favored, and gave her the name, Elainis. The only reason she wasn't made immortal is that my father specifically forbade it, even though she was his granddaughter through Leda. Instead, she became the greatest Champion of Athena."

Xena sat silently, absorbing the unlikely story. Ares read the doubt in her eyes.

"Xena, in those days the Olympians were much more active among mortals. If you need proof of that, just think about all those old stories from the 'Golden Age'. We were all over the place back then," Ares told her with a wistful smile. "As the centuries passed our direct involvement with mortals became more and more rare. Even back then, mankind was already on the road to creating its own destiny."

Xena shuddered. The idea of the gods appearing on a daily basis and having their hands in everybody's lives felt weird and repugnant to her. Their infrequent meddling had been bad enough in her time. Ares' voice dragged her back from her ruminations.

"Xena, you were the best warrior of your age," Ares said, "but in Elainis' time things were even more brutal. Warriors often faced non-human enemies, and mortals would wage a major war for almost any reason. Pride and arrogance drove them like adolescents. It was as if the whole world was hair-triggered and hormone driven." He answered her incredulity with, "Xena, a lot of warriors were running around with divine blood back then and civilization was still in its youth. It really was something to see." After a speculative pause, he continued. "I guess what I'm telling you is that Elainis was very, very good. Her technical skills were flawless, whether armed or barehanded. She was very strong, very fast, and very beautiful, but also cold and calculating like my sister. She would have eaten Callisto for breakfast. Now she's back. You wouldn't have beaten her as the Warrior Princess. As the Destroyer of Nations, maybe I'd give you even odds."

Xena took his assessment to heart. Though Ares could be boastful, prideful, and grandiose, he also knew warriors and could judge their mettle. His opinion rang true. She'd fought the woman last night and taken a blow that had knocked her off her feet. The stranger had been a very impressive and disciplined fighter, a new and deadly unknown enemy. But now this enemy had a name; Elainis of Mycenae, niece to Helen of Sparta, granddaughter of Zeus himself, and the Champion of Athena.

How had the Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare managed to clone her? Or Callisto? Or Mavican? Or Livia? Or even the failures of Valesca that they'd seen in the lab? They were all long lost to the ages; every cell, every atom, and every memory ground to dust two millennia ago and lying far beyond recall. And what had disturbed Harry so much about the filming of the Livia disc that he'd taken from the lab?

The warrior reached behind her chair and lifted the hard-shell cases, stacking them atop the desks. Her hand settled softly on the one that held Gabrielle's twin swords. With her bardic imagination and her gifts of deduction and induction, her soulmate could have figured the mystery out. Using only a few clues, she'd been the first to identify their enemy. Instead, Xena applied the facts to a mental diagram, using the flowchart method that she'd learned from Mithridates and later utilized as a military commander. Eventually she reached an appalling conclusion.

"Your sister treads the roads of time," she said, "but not with complete freedom."

"No god ever acted with complete freedom," Ares replied. "There were always limits. If I had the power to pass through the years, I'd still be limited to revisiting those times and places where I was exalted. Other times belong to other gods. A rule of thumb would be that I could visit times when I had temples full of worshippers. For Athena, this would include the period from the Dorian invasion of about 1500 BC, to the rise of Rome ...or later, maybe 400 AD, if she went to Roman lands in the guise of Minerva."

"Could she bring stuff back?"

"Oh yeah. I can bring you across space if we're in contact. If Athena has the power to cross time, then she can bring back whatever she can carry."

Xena sat for several moments thinking about what Ares had said. If she hadn't seen the cloning lab or known that there had been two Callistos, then she would have suspected that Athena had brought her original enemies to the present. It would have been too good to be true. Athena had only needed to transfer a hair or a few cells from the ancient world to recreate her warriors. Time and her science would do the rest, and for a god, time is an ally. In fact, Xena realized, Athena could simply wait until old age removed her as a challenger. The fact that she wasn't willing to wait probably meant that she felt she had a score to settle. With that thought in mind, Xena realized that it was up to her to force the confrontation. That was fine with her; she'd always preferred offense to defense, acting rather than being forced to react. So she would take the battle to Athena, but to do that, she needed an army and a special weapon. For now, Xena had done all she could do about the army. As for the weapon, her next goal lay halfway across the world outside of Iskenderun.

"Ares, I have to go to Alexandretta," she said, "I have to believe that it's still there."

"I'll take you. It'll be better if your trip goes unnoticed. There are too many computers nowadays...too many records kept, and way too many eyes watching. You're already at war, Xena, and for now, you must disappear from the world."

"You're right, an' I wouldn't be able to travel on a plane armed. I'll be ready in ten minutes." Xena got up from her desk and hurried upstairs to her bedroom to change into clothing appropriate for exploring the rough uplands to the east of the Cilician Gates.

Thirty-five minutes later, Danielle Lefferts dabbed her eyes, peeled herself off of the sofa, and answered the pounding at the door. It was Harry Tasker, frantic with haste, and he was accompanied by another man she didn't know. The CWO stared at them. After her injury during last night's attack on the school, she really wasn't in the mood for more drama than she could cry over in her afternoon soaps.

"Serena!" her neighbor barked into the depths of the house, before questioning her. "Where is she? Has she been here?" Danielle cringed. Her neighbor seemed possessed.

"Haven't seen her since last night," the CWO answered shakily, "I don't know when she'll be back. Last I'd heard, she was being questioned by the police."

He shoved his way past her into the house and she was too startled, (and dulled from the codeine she'd been given along with her stitches), to stop him. Instead, she limped after the two men in narcotized amazement as they practically ran to the study. It was empty, as she expected, but on Serena's desk lay a set of photos and a note. Harry scanned the note quickly and then handed it to the stunned naval officer.

"For you," he said. He turned to Gib and ordered, "check her room upstairs. Master bedroom at the end of the hall."

The agent hurried out. Harry and Danielle could hear his footsteps on the stairs and then as they tracked down the hall. In under a minute he was on his way back.

"She's gone," Gib reported, holding up the clothes Xena had worn on the plane less than an hour ago, "changed and left quick as Vanna." He tossed them on the desk.

Danielle could hardly believe her eyes. Serena had been home and hadn't even bothered to see her. She'd been so quiet that the CWO hadn't even known she'd been in the house. It took her all of fifteen seconds to read the note Serena had hastily written. The words made it sound suspiciously like she was going to disappear again.

It was bad enough that their school had been attacked on a weekly basis and that all the students had sustained injuries last night. It was worse that Gabriella was dead and Serena had disappeared. Practically the first thing that she'd learned about the Pappas woman was that she'd foiled a terrorist hostage situation at a bank in Quantico. Danielle had come to believe that the tall woman spent half her time running around God-knew-where, amidst a whirlwind of violence. She'd been dragging Gabriella with her into danger for who-knew-how-long, but last night had been once too often. The blonde teacher that she'd come to admire since they'd met in San Francisco had become the casualty of some clandestine animosity she couldn't understand. Danielle hadn't even known Gabriella for two months, but in that time she'd perceived a well of knowledge that was astonishing in someone so young. Through her Vicodin stupor, the CWO realized that she blamed Serena for Gabriella's death. Yes, she thought, everything had happened too fast, since she'd first arrived here in Columbia. It was more tragic than an afternoon drama.

The sequence of events had left her stunned; she'd finally accepted that her hostesses were almost certainly spies after talking with her father. From the behavior of her neighbor, she was beginning to suspect him too. The CWO wondered just what the odds were of her, the daughter of a Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, having fallen into a den of covert operatives in the midst of a shadowy crisis. She resolved to have another talk with her dad. Danielle shifted her weight onto her right leg to ease the tugging on the stitches in her left thigh.

The movement of Harry snatching a cell phone from his belt drew her attention. From his inside jacket pocket he retrieved a small device and clipped it over the microphone. Naval CWO3 Danielle Lefferts, whose area of expertise was communications encryption, knew a digital VOX-scrambler when she saw one. She had never seen one so small. Harry speed dialed a very long number. He made no attempt to hide his conversation.

"Harry Tasker, 1-0-0-2-4. I need an F-15E with conformal and external fuel tanks at Columbia Metropolitan in thirty minutes. Arrange in-flight refuelings, one over the Azores, another over the Med. I'll need landing clearance at Incirlik Airbase and a chopper once I get there," Harry ordered. "From Incirlik it's only 75 miles to Iskenderun. Have a Humvee standing by in Iskenderun for me." He flipped the phone closed and replaced it on his belt.

"Ready to enjoy my flying again, Gib?" He asked the second agent.

Danielle noticed that the man looked very worried. He'd begun fidgeting as soon as Harry had spoken on the phone.

"Now Harry, you haven't flown an Eagle in what, twelve years? Maybe we should get two planes with pilots? Wouldn't want to end up looking like pigeon droppings on Gibraltar. Besides, Helen'll shell your nuts."

Harry smiled at his fellow agent with genuine amusement etched on his face.

"What's the matter, Gib? I'll make sure they leave you an airsickness bag. Just make sure to pull off your oxygen mask before you try to use it. C'mon...trust me."

Even as Al Gibson groaned and resigned himself to being trapped in a small cockpit with Harry, they turned to leave. As they reached the door of the study, Harry looked back at the stunned CWO.

"Take good care of the house, Danielle," the agent said, "I hope to see Serena again."

**Continued in Chapter 3**

31


	3. Clonefic Part 3 Chapter 3

Clonefic

Part 3 Chapter 3

By Phantom Bard

**For Disclaimer**: See Part 3 Chapter 1

_**November 10, 2001 - Iskenderun, Republic of Turkey**_

"It's 8:50 am and the current temperature this morning is 11°C, headed up to 18°C, with scattered clouds..." He switched off the radio and ad libbed the continuation in perfect modern Turkish. "...and a gentle breeze from the west southwest at 4 km/h, blowing the salt air inland off the Gulf of Alexandretta. It's a beautiful late-fall morning."

Using the guise of Greek tourists, the couple had claimed Xena's reserved room the previous night after picking up her rental Jeep. Xena had been only moderately surprised to find that her money had transformed from US Dollars to Turkish Lira, somewhere in the aether that they'd flashed through between Columbia and Iskenderun. Now they were driving north from Iskenderun on highway D817, headed for the city of Osmaniye after a continental breakfast that Xena had scarfed down and Ares had only stared at.

The highway followed the curve of the bayshore for the first sixty-odd kilometers, passing resort towns and villages in the fertile sward of lowland beneath the brooding heights of the Nur Daglari to the east. The traffic was fairly light, certainly nothing like what Xena had experienced in California or even in South Carolina, though the abundant palm trees recalled San Diego. So far they were making good time. After a half-hour they passed a sign announcing Dortyol, and the Historic Site of Issos.

"Ya know, Ares, that's where a mortal changed the world," Xena reflected. Behind dark folding Wayfarers her eyes tracked east toward the ancient battlefield. "Granikos coulda' been a fluke, but after Issos the Persian Empire was lost. Maybe some folks think Alexander's triumph wasn't assured 'till he seized Babylon in 330 BC, but Issos is where everything really changed." The cloned warrior was thoughtful for a moment, and then added, "ya know, if he'd stopped after Babylon the known world still woulda' been a Greek world and he woulda' lived to enjoy it."

"Alexander was always obsessed with Persia, even before Chaeronia. After winning at Granikos the kid was besotted with his successes, and then after solving the challenge of Gordium he just became more grandiose," the God of War remembered. "Once destiny gets its claws in a man there's no limit. You know how it is, Xena. The thrill of victory is infectious. Conquest becomes an addiction. Phillip, Alexander...I always egged them on to glory, and now it seems like my sister is just as susceptible."

"You're right. I've felt it an' I gotta say I'm glad I was able to stop when I did. Somewhere along the way it started to feel empty. I guess I found that it wasn't the outcome of the battle that I treasured, but knowing that the things I was fightin' for were worthwhile. Of course I still love a good fight, but it feels so much better when it's for a good cause."

"Yeah, somehow, you were different." She'd been the first great one to walk away.

Ares looked sideways at his Chosen as she became reabsorbed in her driving. Long before her time, mortals had been happy with just the exhilaration of beating down an enemy, and they'd often used the flimsiest of excuses to start a war. They'd been adrenaline junkies, still flaunting their primate heritage. Somewhere along the road down the years things had begun to change. At first the gods hadn't really noticed it, since they were still being beseeched for favors, but it had changed. Mortals had changed. They had grown up and found their own priorities through the increasing use of reason, conscience, and ethics. Somewhere along the way, the gods had become, first an accessory, then an impediment, and finally irrelevant. Mankind had come to worship its own enterprises, founded on its own efforts, the efforts of mortals. And now it was coming full circle.

Mortal reliance on reason had led to the hegemony of science, a practice whose goal and basis was increasing knowledge. That knowledge was often applied to war. Knowledge eventually led to wisdom, at least sometimes. In the current foundation and exercise of science, mortals had become the worshippers of a deity who personified the attributes of wisdom and warfare. Ares idly worried the seam of his trousers between his thumb and forefinger...weaving has come a long way too, he realized, tied to the innovations of fiber and manufacturing tech-knowledge-y. Athena had probably never had so many devotees, even though almost all of them worshipped her unknowingly. Still, each time they made a decision favoring science over the ethics they'd once substituted for the gods, they laid a sacrifice before their goddess. The sheer amount of psychic energy that mortals were devoting to the applications of "The Three W's" was empowering his sister and leaving her subject to ambition.

That ambition had always been present. From the beginning, both she and Ares had questioned their father's decision to have two gods of war. From that decision, rivalry had been born. Both brother and sister were masterful and competitive personalities. They had each envisioned a world in which warfare was waged according to the qualities within their own domains. In the early years, Ares had held sway. Battles had featured the combat of champions, honorable codes of fighting, and the glorification of individuals for their courage and prowess. In those days, Athena had been occupied planting the seeds of the quest for understanding, knowledge, and wisdom. But as the years passed, things had begun to shift. Ever more often, war had been waged with espionage, poisons, and the tactics of massed ranks of uniform soldiers. The strategies of brilliant generals had decided contests instead of the peerless skills of a few individuals. Soon the Greeks had adopted the methods of the massed hoplite phalanx, and finally, there had come the legions of Rome. Athena's influence had grown beyond the battlefield as well, until in the modern world, science even more than warfare molded the world. And now at last, Athena seemed willing to embrace her ancient ambitions; she seemed to be poised on the verge of declaring herself to those who would follow her beliefs and conquer the world.

There were some other disturbing aspects of Athena's behavior that Ares dwelled on as the drive continued and the couple fell into silence. Long ago in Aulis, Iphigenia had been bled to death as a sacrifice to Artemis, in restitution for Agammemnon's killing of a stag sacred to the Huntress. She had been stone-dead, but not only had Athena wrested her soul from Hades, she had also managed to grace her with a perfected body, similar to, yet better than the one she'd been born with. The only gift lacking had been eternal life, which Zeus had forbade in a tantrum, shrieking that the girl was an abomination...and at the time, that was saying a lot. The ancient world had been filled with all manners of altered and contrived beings the gods had created. Ares had always thought it a bit...odd.

Then there was the fact that Athena, calculating as she was, had departed from the most efficient strategy for conquest by diverting resources to plague his Favorite with her long lost enemies. It wasn't typical of her to spend so much energy on a frivolous pursuit. It didn't make sense except in light of some vendetta the goddess was enmeshed in. Athena had succumbed to temptation in Rome, but that had backfired on her badly. In any case, it was all long ago. So what was it about Xena that had gotten under his sister's skin now? He had no answer to that, and in a way it didn't matter. The one mortal who had walked away had come back to do battle with the goddess who couldn't let go of her old ambitions for the mortal world.

After an hour and a half on the road, Xena turned onto highway E90 for a short stretch of two kilometers, before turning right onto O-52 at Toprakkale. Another fifteen-km quickly passed, and then a left turn led them onto a secondary road headed north towards Kadrili. Now the land was rising, but still lay mantled in the fertile citrus green that had surrounded the Iskenderun Korfezi, the Gulf of Alexandretta. The road followed gentle curves, and in the hazy distance seventy-km ahead, the heights of the Dibek Daglari were visible, rising in ochres and siennas bespeckled with the dark green of drought resistant vegetation. There the land ascended to the plateau of Anatolia's interior, where some peaks rose over 12,000 feet and the average was more than a mile above the level of the Mediterranean Sea. It was a landscape of ridges and valleys, crumpled and pleated by the hands of the Titans. It was a land that had long tested the hardiness of travelers.

What a trek it had been in ancient times. Two thousand years before planes and cars, the soulmates had walked almost the whole way to the highlands before Xena had left Gabrielle with four year old Eve in a town the size of a poor man's spittoon at the foot of the high trail. The altitude there had been about 2,000 cubits, (3,000 feet). Having lived their lives mostly at sea level wouldn't have made it an easy climb for the bard; for a child it was out of the question. Xena had continued on alone, expecting to be gone three or four days.

The landscape had become drier, the temperatures more extreme, and water had been harder to find. At night, winds whistled chill around the campfires she'd kindled out of twisted limbs and desiccated scrub. The thinning air had made every step progressively harder as the paths ascended in switchbacks that doubled the distance. Scree and sand overlying irregular rock had made her footing treacherous. Above 8,000 feet, the lack of oxygen had become more noticeable with every candlemark of hiking.

Xena had slowed her pace in deference to her constantly labored breathing and uncharacteristically shortened stamina. Poor rations, diarrhea from lack of good water, and the cumulative fatigue from having already crossed eastern Indus, Arachosia, Carmania, Persia, Media, and Mesopotamia, (or what are now Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the eastern states of India), had all conspired to weaken her. It had been a hard trip for the warrior, and the impact on Gabrielle and Eve had been almost intolerable. In reaching the southern borders of Cilicia, they'd traversed over 2,500 miles, most of it through mountains or skirting deserts, and most of it on foot. Incredibly, it had been the safest route. Xena hadn't known or trusted a single sea captain between Arabia and Indus back then, but she had known that the area was overrun with small-time pirates.

At night, staring up into a sky that seemed unbelievably full of stars, the Warrior Princess had begun to doubt the wisdom of the trip. Did she really need another chakram so badly that she was willing to subject her daughter and her soulmate to this? Would the creation of a combined weapon never before seen make such a necessary addition to her arsenal? No, probably not. But the vision of it had come to her during her purification in Indus, and she had felt that it was a part of her destiny...though that was reason enough for her to question this quest. Yet in the back of her mind she'd been gnawed by the conviction that she was doing the right thing. That feeling she couldn't ignore. By fusing the paired Chakrams of Darkness and Light, she would be removing from the world the Chakram of Light's potential to kill a god. It was a power that no mortal should possess, and unfortunately, these lands were now Roman territory. She'd finally convinced herself that it was better to have the chakram in her own hand, than have to face it in the hands of an enemy.

And so she'd left her soulmate and her daughter in a stinking three-goat town while she'd traipsed off to torture herself with thin air, no food, and meager water. Gabrielle would eventually forgive her, but Xena would probably never forgive herself for dragging her daughter along. On the way from Greece to Indus two years before, she'd carried the then barely two-year-old girl on her back. Now, two years later, Eve had walked more miles than most adult shepherds, so when she started whining, Xena gave her piggyback rides. At least leaving Greece had taken them beyond the easy reach of the Romans...for a while. Yet Xena had no illusions. News of their return to Thrace would quickly be heard in Rome, and then the hunt would be on again. Caesar would be waiting for the right chance to strike. When that time came, she had decided to end it, to recapture the chance she'd missed at Thasos almost fifteen years before, and to destroy Julius Caesar. She had a daughter now and she couldn't afford to have that obsessive bastard dogging her for the rest of her life. It would be a mercy killing, for Eve's sake.

In the silence the warrior's empty stomach had grumbled, so she'd gnawed on the scrap of leather that she'd relegated to the purpose of making her salivate to dull her hunger. It was an old soldier's trick that every campaigner had used at some point, though very few actually ate their sandals. Protecting their feet was far too important on the battlefield. In fact, many warriors had died from infected foot wounds. Xena idly remembered that yesterday morning she'd managed to pick off a rodent of some sort with a well thrown rock, and that it had been her last meal. She'd scraped the pelt clean with her teeth, much as one would an artichoke leaf. It had been a miserably stringy excuse for a creature.

She'd looked ahead to where the trail crested a ridge, judging it a bit under 7,150 cubits, or about 10,700 feet in altitude. Beyond it the land would dip perhaps 250 cubits, (375 feet), down to a small, talus choked plateau on which sat the Temple of the Chakrams. It was a forgotten and rundown temple that supported no clergy, conducted no rituals, and greeted no living pilgrims. Within the building sat an altar, supposedly carved by Hephaestos himself, and invested with a guardian spirit under the dominion of Hades.

_(After the Second Titanomachy, Zeus had decreed the weapons off limits and contrived a defense that would not even suffer a god's touch. He knew his family's historic penchant for infighting and patricide, and would not arm them against each other or himself. In an act of divine hubris, the King of the Gods had commanded the guardian to surrender possession of only that chakram to which a mortal could lay claim by embodying it's essence; Day or Night, Darkness or Light. Such a situation was deemed as possible as that of a mortal breathing in Poseidon's realm or flying in Apollo's. Many had been tempted and many had failed. The surrounding landscape was reported to be littered with the desiccated remains of mortals who had attempted to enter unpurified. Yet the conditions were met three times before Xena's death.) Editor_

The warrior calculated that it would be within her reach tomorrow, if she could get an early start and had a good day of hiking. Half a candlemark at the temple was all she'd need, and then she could head back downslope. It would be a faster trip, Xena promised herself, and three days from now I'll treat Gabrielle and Eve to a whole goat, cut into kebabs marinated in spices and yogurt, with olives, feta, grape leaves, couscous, and that sweet honeyed wine. And after falling asleep dreaming of food, she had.

_**November 10, 2001 - Columbia, South Carolina**_

Danielle Lefferts hadn't been able to reach her father all afternoon yesterday. It wasn't the first time, but it was rare that she couldn't even get a message to him. She'd dozed off early and started trying her phone again in the morning. When her call finally managed to get through she found her father in a tense mood. He was atypically irritable and seemed fairly disturbed about something.

"Dad, I need to talk to you," she'd said immediately, "so much has happened. I've been in the middle of things I think you should know about. I don't really understand what most of it means. I think my teachers are spies, just like you said. I'm pretty sure my next door neighbor is too."

"Is this line secure?"

Danielle's eyes started from her head. Her father had never begun a conversation with her that way. She double-checked the settings on the box she'd clipped into the line between Serena's desk phone and the wall jack. It was roughly the size of a pack of cigarettes. She breathed a sigh of relief as she noted the green indicator lights showing the scrambler's functions as nominal.

"Yes, Dad, the En-4P is operational and set at M."

"Switch to channel R on my mark," he said, "three...two...one...mark."

Danielle turned a knob on the box, changing the channel from the moderate to the fully restricted protocol. "Done," she reported.

"I want you out of there immediately," Capt. Lefferts ordered without preamble, "you're sitting on a damn powder keg and you'll be safer on a base. No one really knows what's going on and it's obvious to me that inquiry is being stifled at the highest levels. Do you understand what that means?"

"No."

"It means we've been blindsided. It means there are gaping holes in this nation's security and we are not in control. It means that what you've been seeing there is the tip of an iceberg whose true mass may well encompass the White House."

It was the most shocking admission Danielle had ever heard from her father.

"Dad, one of my teachers was killed last night. The killer was a stranger armored in material I've never seen except on the two who attacked last week. This one moved...too fast, too well...as well as my teachers ever did."

"Better than anyone you've ever seen in a tournament, right?"

"I've never seen anyone like any of them, Dad. They're all way too good. Far better than I am after thirty years of training. And then there's my neighbor..."

"That would be Harry Tasker?"

"Yes. Dad, what kind of operative could make a phone call and order an F-15 delivered in a half-hour? He was going to fly it to Incirlik himself."

Silence greeted her.

"And he had a VOX-scrambler like nothing I've ever seen. It was barely the size of a Tylenol caplet and it clipped onto his cell phone."

"Honeybee," Capt. Lefferts rarely called her that, "Harry Tasker is a computer salesman, plain and simple. He has a full history with details beautifully fabricated. When I tried to access further information, my queries were denied and the authorization code for clearance authentication wasn't a familiar type. He's definitely a spy, and one of ours, but I can't find out anything more about him. Ten minutes after my search was denied I got a communiqué on a red channel. Cease and desist forthwith."

"Like..."

"Like the one I got after the Miami Op."

"And my teachers?"

"My best guess is..." he paused, as though he couldn't bring himself to speak the words. In Columbia, Danielle held her breath waiting. "A new breed of operatives engineered in the dark."

Danielle decoded her father's words. _A new breed..._not akin to any existing agents from the known spy shops, and an order of magnitude more advanced, _engineered..._again, not trained in a conventional manner, _...in the dark,_ from a place unknown to the twilit world of espionage. Her remaining teacher was a wild card. Her neighbor was a spy with an impenetrable cover, from a rumored super-agency that no one could even prove existed.

"And their enemies?" she asked.

"Without a doubt, the same."

"Dad, the day before yesterday Serena and Gabriella were gone all day and night."

Capt. Lefferts knew that the day before yesterday a Dept. of Energy installation in Georgia had been "assaulted by terrorists". The target was supposedly a coordination center for intelligence gleaned from Iraqi weapons inspectors, or so DOE claimed. It wasn't a target that made any sense, and so the captain assumed that it was a cover story. The details had been efficiently suppressed, but remote sensors reporting to ONI-6 had revealed the low atmospheric detonation of a weapon configured to produce an intense but localized electromagnetic pulse burst. It was not a weapon that was listed in the ordinance folio of the United States of America. Eighteen minutes later the DOE installation had been destroyed. The captain believed that US operatives had struck a US facility. It was the harbinger of an internecine government civil war. The first attack was provocation, the second attack and Gabriella's death were retaliation. It chilled his blood.

He only told her, "I'm not surprised, I think they were busy."

Danielle gulped. Her father knew something. There was another point he'd mentioned the last time they'd talked. It was related, and she asked him about that now.

"You'd mentioned having someone on the inside investigating Serena and Gabriella..."

"I think we've been had. That whole investigation was a clever con game; a perfectly executed op designed to buy time while forestalling our activities. I'd stake anything that it was orchestrated by Tasker's people. I thought we were giving them enough rope to hang themselves, and they left us with a dummy on a string. Now your teachers are gone, Harry Tasker's untouchable, their enemies are invisible...and we have nothing."

Danielle thought that her father had never sounded so bitter. After a long and successful career he'd been shown just where he stood, and it was a long step down from what he'd thought. The CWO could sympathize with that. At the tournament in San Francisco she'd felt the same way. Thirty years of training, over ten years as a world class competitor, and she'd been defeated by an unknown who had made it look easy. And they weren't the only ones. After the attack on the school and the killing of her partner, Danielle wondered if her teacher had felt just as surprised. She asked herself, what would Serena do?

_**November 10, 2001 - North of Andirin, Republic of Turkey**_

The road had been rising more steeply for the last twenty kilometers. Xena and Ares were traversing the zone where the land began its transition to the scrubby heights of the Dibek Daglari, whose inhospitable droughtlands reached for the uncaring sky. The road followed the natural contour of a cleft between two ridges, taking the easiest ascent available and tracing the footpath the warrior had hiked two millennia before. It had been chosen for the postwar road builders by the bandits and herdsmen, who for over a hundred generations had followed the wisdom of their beasts. Thus the modern Turkish civil engineers had been guided in their planning by ancient goats.

In some places Xena recognized the jagged shape of the skyline. In other places a vista of the flatlands below triggered a memory. These dim assurances from another lifetime bolstered the warrior's confidence in her route, for she wasn't certain of how to get to the temple except by retracing a hike made long ago. The fact that her recollections of the way were coming back to her brought Xena great relief. After the road on their map abruptly ended, just past the town of Cokak, there would be another fifteen steep miles to traverse on foot. They would reach that point after another twenty-km.

Xena chewed on a Power Bar as she continued the drive. The wind whistled past the shiny black Jeep in a monotonous buffeting monotone that lulled her mind while failing to alleviate her tension. The Power Bar tasted like chocolate roughage, fit more for cattle than people. It was wholly unsatisfying and very difficult to swallow. Musty bottled water only helped a little. The cloned warrior wished for real food, any real food, even a stringy rodent. She spat the last mouthful out the window in disgust and pushed down harder on the gas pedal. Ares chuckled. The scenery slipped by.

Three km outside of Cokak her attention drifted to a dull roar that reminded her of rolling thunder. Her eyes tracked to the source of the sound. Overhead to the north, a gray silhouette quickly resolved into a jet; much smaller than an airliner, with undersized delta shaped wings and a dual tail. It was coming in low from the west, at barely 15,000 feet. On its underside, Xena could see twin air intakes and exhaust outlets and three streamlined external fuel tanks. It banked in a tight arc, coming onto a new heading, south by southwest. Then the roar increased in volume and the jet accelerated sharply away, trailing twin exhalations of fire and smoke from its flaming afterburners. In moments it was just a dot, dwindling in the distance.

"F-15E," Ares said after taking a quick glance up, "probably a US Air Force fighter out on training maneuvers and carrying no armament. It's heading 210°, to Incirlik Airbase."

They reached Cokak five minutes later.

The road comprised the town's narrow main street, flanked by a dozen and a half sorry buildings that ranged from modern cinderblock ugly to traditional mudbrick impoverished. A few goats walked the town. Fewer humans sat outside a nondescript café, smoking and drinking bottles of Izmit beer. The most colorful thing visible was a sun-bleached mural, painted on a pockmarked beige-washed wall, which advertised Hosni-Turkman oval cigarettes. The lurid face of a fez wearing Ottoman leered like a pedophile through a billowing cloud of smoke. All in all, it was pathetic. Xena expected their Jeep would be stolen and stashed in a container aboard a ship at the port of Adana before dinnertime. At least she'd left everything they weren't going to carry locked up back in her motel room in Iskenderun.

At the edge of town the road dead-ended as expected. The pavement stopped at a guardrail just before a precipitous drop-off of several hundred feet. Xena parked the Jeep with its front bumper to the railing and shut off the engine.

"Ready for a lovely walk?" She asked the God of War. She took a moment to stretch against her seat, and then rubbed a hand across her face.

"I can hardly wait," Ares replied sarcastically as he stared out the windshield at the veritable wasteland. Then he seemed to perk up. "As I remember, this is where I ditched that weasel, Sarphis 'the Bad'," the God of War pronounced the epithet with derision, "...he was the loser I picked to grab the Chakram of Darkness. At least he was evil enough to satisfy the requirements. If I remember correctly, he'd eaten his victims, primarily his own children...remarkably like dear old Granddad. Ha!" Ares seemed to ponder the past for a moment. "Sarphis...he liked to eat in the bath, after filling the tub with blood. He kept a harem of women pregnant, farming them for his table."

"What a charmer," Xena said, "he must've been perfect, I suppose that's why ya picked him for the job."

"Oh yeah, he was quite a find. Definitely the right person at the right time. His bones are probably still at the bottom of this ravine, scattered by the scavengers way back when. A fitting end for an ignoble bastard." Ares chuckled before adding, "Without his efforts I couldn't have gotten the Dark Chakram for you, Xena. Perhaps you should thank him."

"Or perhaps not," the cloned warrior said as she opened her door and stepped out. She grabbed a daypack off the back seat, shouldered it, and checked the placement of the short sword that was lashed to its side. The grip was in the same position her own sword usually took, perfect for an easy grab over her right shoulder. The Combined Chakram was clipped to her belt. Sarphis the Bad, Xena thought, if he was the personification of "dark" like the chakram, what does that say about Ares...or myself?

The God of War stepped out onto the road, made a subtle gesture towards the front of the Jeep, and then walked around the back to join Xena on the driver's side. He give her a self-satisfied smirk. An outlandishly heavy chain of welded links had appeared, attaching the vehicle's front axle and frame to the posts supporting the railing. The chain was continuous and there was no lock. Xena grinned when she saw a slight shimmer travel along it.

They ignored the glances from the few locals and made their way to a small trailhead, off to one the side of the railing. It led them down the embankment in a series of steep switchbacks, finding the bottom of the ravine and then climbing the far side before disappearing around a ridge. Looking back, the cloned warrior noted that a couple of the locals were already examining the possibility of auto theft and arguing over the chain. She suspected that even if they brought out a welding torch to cut it off, they'd find it impervious. They'd never believe it was due to divine enchantment. She was strongly tempted to send the chakram winging back at them to cut off their hands.

_**November 10, 2001 - Incirlik Airbase, Turkey**_

"Omega Special, you are cleared for landing on runway 18, heading 185º true, wind is steady at 1.2 knots from south southwest, Incirlik control out."

"Copy tower, Omega Special on final approach, thanks for the welcome."

"Negative final, Omega Special, you are at mach 1.35, advise you abort and reapproach, do you copy?" (Flight controller with her hand over the mic, "Is he fucking crazy?")

"Copy, tower, negative abort, landing on runway 18. Trust me."

The major in command of the control tower listened to his controller and ordered the emergency crews to stand by, then shook his head, expecting to see a $45 million aircraft crash and burn. The Strike Eagle was only two miles out and still traveling at 1,000 mph.

He'd been ordered to give this flight the highest priority, clear all other traffic, and have a MH-6J "Little Bird" helicopter waiting on the runway apron. His CO had termed the flight personnel, "non-officer/non-civ", rather than commissioned military officers, which meant they were almost certainly spies. The major guessed that they were CIA. With Syria only a hundred miles away, they wouldn't be the first spooks to fly themselves in since Sept. 11th. More incredibly, the flight origin was a commercial airport in South Carolina. Originally built to perform deep strike missions against high value targets, this F-15E "Strike Eagle" had been flown non-stop from the other side of the globe. Its flight crew must be completely deafened and dehydrated by now, he thought, not to mention jet lagged big time. Obviously their judgement was significantly compromised too. In layman's terms, they were suicidal. They'd reach the runway still doing better than 900 mph. The major wondered how many gallons of fuel still remained in the three external tanks under the plane. Whatever happened, it was sure to be dramatic. He watched the jet with morbid fascination. Beside him, the flight controller was chewing her nails.

The F-15E descended from the northeast and then banked south on its approach to runway 18. The standard left-hand flight pattern and the separation of downwind, base, and final approach legs all blurred together. The fighter had cut its afterburners only five miles out and had lined up still way hot. In a maneuver that would have made a Top Gun envious, the pilot jerked the nose up while only 1,000 feet off the deck, bleeding 700 mph of velocity by going almost vertical for several heartstopping seconds. He then corrected his pitch and deployed the landing gear, using their air drag to decelerate further. The fighter lowered its flaps, throttled down, touched the runway at 165 mph, and deployed its airbrakes. It came to a stop uncomfortably close to the waiting Little Bird's rotors.

The landing hadn't been anything like "by the book flying", but every flight adjustment had been admirably precise, despite the whole procedure having been flagrantly reckless. The major was suitably impressed with the agents' macho disregard for safety. He wished them continued success with whatever they were doing.

Without delay, the cockpit swung up. Two men deplaned and ran to the helo. One carried a briefcase, the other appeared slightly unsteady on his feet. Unlike any other pilots the major had seen, the men kept their helmets on and their visors down, protecting themselves from the rotorwash and remaining completely anonymous. The crew in the MH-6J never saw their faces either, nor did the sergeant who turned over the Humvee to them on the landing pad in Iskenderun.

In the back of the Humvee the agents traded their flight suits for casual wear, taking on the guise of vacationing businessmen. Harry and Al consulted their notes and then drove to the motel where Serena Pappas had made her reservations. It was time to be spies.

The Bahadirli Oteli was a two-star establishment on the Professor Muammer Aksoy Caddesi, a main avenue very close to the airport. It was neither ostentatious nor pricey, but it was convenient and relatively anonymous. Each of the five suites went for 37.00 USD a night, the thirty-two double rooms for 10.00 USD less.

Harry identified himself as an agent of the American CIA and showed the fidgeting desk clerk a photo of Serena Pappas. The man blanched and lit up a Hosni-Trukman cigarette. He began puffing furiously. These American secret police made him nervous. That woman had made him very nervous. He took the picture with shaking hands as if he'd become guilty of something by touching it. It helped that both Harry and Al were able to speak Turkish far better than the clerk could speak either English or Greek.

"Have you seen this woman?" Harry asked in a confidential tone, hoping that the man would relax a little. The clouds of smoke were making his head spin.

"Yes, she had been here just last night," the man told the agents, "in Suite Two, which is still being held with her reservation. You just missed her and her friend."

"What friend?" Al barked, making the clerk jump.

"She was accompanied by a man, yes? A man who, like her, had been traveling with an American passport, though both spoke Greek and had claimed Greek citizenship. Strange couple, eh?" The clerk didn't ask if they were fugitives...he really didn't want to know. They had been Greeks, and he was a Turk. Their countries were still at odds over Cypress, while the Americans were closer to being friends.

A thousand lira note changed hands, and the agents were provided with a key. Inside Suite Two, Harry and Al found an overnight bag containing some of Xena's clothes, and three hard-shell cases. The smallest was empty; the longest held Xena's sword and daggers. The medium sized one held one of Gabrielle's twin swords. Harry picked the cases up and carried them back to the desk.

"Hold these for their owner in the hotel's safe," he ordered the desk clerk, handing him several thousand lira, "tell her it's a precaution, with the compliments of a friend."

The clerk breathed a sigh of relief and nodded agreeably, then locked the cases in the massive vault behind him.

"Do you know where they've gone?" Al asked suspiciously.

"Yes. But why they go off to the Dibek Mountains," the clerk asked them rhetorically, shaking his head, "to be hiking in the highlands? Nothing is there. Why they go north, eh, instead of south, to the beaches in Arsuz, like any sensible tourist? They were strange people those Americans, no offense, eh?"

"Strange how?" Harry asked, curious about the man's impressions.

"They were courteous, but so cold," he told them, actually shivering at the recollection. "They spoke little, the man never ate, and the evil eye, yes, they had the eyes of killers."

After learning that Xena had rented a black Jeep, the agents returned to their Humvee and headed back to the airbase at Incirlik.

"Uh, Harry, I don't think Xena's going to appreciate us trailing after her, you know," Al commented as they sped north on highway D817.

"Al, you saw the video from the attack on the school," Harry replied. He was abusing the speed limit and staring ahead out the windshield with a grim expression. "You saw that woman who attacked them. She killed Gabrielle and now I'm really worried. Xena wasn't the same on the plane. You were there. She was on edge and looking for trouble. Whether she likes it or not, it won't hurt her to have some back up."

"Well, okay, Harry," Gib said, ever the agreeable sidekick. "So what's the plan?"

"First, we're going to have a look around up there in those mountains. We don't know where Xena's actually headed, who she's with, or what she'll find waiting for her. With the enemies she's got, there could be deadly trouble. After what she told us and the things we've seen..." Harry gritted his teeth with worry, "...we can't afford to let anything happen to her. She's the only one who knows what's going on. Maybe Xena will be fine, but I've got a bad feeling about this."

Albert Gibson looked out the window. He was nervous, and for a moment he wished that he were back in the van. "I know you're thinking of doing more than just having a look around up there..."

"Of course I am. Give Spencer a call. We're going to need the CO at the base to be in a cooperative mood. I'm going to need a couple favors."

_**November 10, 2001 - West of Cokak, Turkey**_

The trail wound along ridges and cliff faces, switching back on itself and twisting to display the heights yet to be climbed. The afternoon sun beat down as the cloned warrior and the God of War steadily continued. So far they'd made good time by Xena's reckoning, covering slightly over two miles in the last hour. In the miles ahead though, the grade would steepen steadily, until it ended with an unmerciful climb up a broken, boulder-strewn escarpment that crowned the last mile. By that point, as Xena's clone remembered, the path had been indiscernible, and on her earlier trip she had been guided to the notch in the skyline above by a view that she'd only seen in a vision.

Today she had the benefit of prior experience. The harsh landscape was triggering an increasing flow of information from her previous climb, and from what she was remembering, the way seemed easier this time. Today the clone wasn't half starved, two-thirds dehydrated, and wholly fraught with doubts and worries. Two thousand years before, the original Warrior Princess had already been lagging, whereas now she merely walked with determination. She was very happy to note that the thinning air wasn't afflicting her with the abysmal fatigue she so clearly remembered. That state would have been intolerable, especially with the God of War nonchalantly pacing along beside her, completely unaffected.

Perhaps it was because she was a full five years younger than she had been on her return from Indus so long ago. Perhaps it was because this time she hadn't just traipsed across a continent, half the miles spent with her daughter on her back, bitching and moaning and digging her heels into Xena's flanks as if the warrior were a dying nag. Xena exhaled in amazement at what she'd endured. As the Warrior Princess, she'd accepted motherhood by extending the protectiveness and devotion she'd shared with her soulmate to her daughter. She'd loved them both with all her heart. As the Destroyer of Nations, she was astounded that she hadn't just left the whining girl by the roadside, way back in Arachosia. The clone shook her head in disbelief. What had she been thinking? A child had no place in the life of a warrior.

The modern Xena paced uphill, absorbed in her recollections, while sidestepping rocks, subconsciously choosing her footing, and adapting to the thinning air with 42% greater capacity than a normal mortal. Having finally accepted her birthright, its benefits were accessible to her in their full measure now. The realization never crossed her mind. As she had while standing before Eve's pyre, she'd split her focus. She remained somatically attuned to her surroundings, but at the same time, she concentrated on the memories that would aid her in the task of finding the Chakram of Day, somewhere amidst the ruins of its temple. Today's visit would be much different from that first visit in her original life.

Back then Xena had reached the temple so exhausted that she'd spent the first half-candlemark on the plateau collapsed prone after draping herself over a boulder. The ground had been littered with rocks and more. For a long time only her eyes had moved. Sure enough, the bodies of long dead men and women had lain all around her, scattered by the wind, the scavengers, and the passing years. Among the corpses she'd seen weapons and armor, talismans and jewelry, some of it so old or so foreign that it had appeared wholly alien to her eyes, widely traveled though she was. She'd identified Persians, Lydians, Medes, Cappadocians, Scythians, Carians, and Greeks, all dead for centuries. From details like boar's tusk helmets and crescent shields that she'd only seen in bas-reliefs, she'd guessed that others bore the war-gear of Mycenae, Tiryns, Gla, Themiscyra, and Knossos, cities gone a thousand years and more. Lust for the chakrams had taken hold almost as soon as the Titanomachy ended, and in all that time, none had succeeded. Here the ambitious failures had lain all those centuries, with shields riven, helm and curass buckled; heads and chests stove in by vicious impacts. The warrior had staggered past their corpses in the thin windy air and finally leaned against one of the pylons upholding the massive lintel bridging the gate, trying to catch her breath.

She'd clutched the Chakram of Darkness that hung from her waist. Alone among all mortal warriors, she had come to possess one of the weapons of the gods. In her time, almost no one knew the chakram as anything other than the signature weapon of the Warrior Princess. Almost no one knew that there was more than one.

Xena had felt it strange that the vision she'd received had prompted her to seek the possession of another; stranger still that it was the bright counterpart of her own weapon, rather than the second dark chakram. The warrior could more easily have understood a quest to take the Chakram of Night, Artemis' weapon, for she had ties to the Amazon Nation. The Chakram of Light was Athena's weapon, a "bright" chakram, deadly to a god even in mortal hands. Perhaps strangest of all, Xena didn't covet that power.

She'd had no ambition to kill any god. She'd had no ambition to conquer cities, to rule the lands, or to build an empire. She'd desired no army to command. In fact, those typical martial ambitions that still persisted within her had been burned out of Xena's soul in Indus. There she had finally recognized that, as a warrior, her skills engendered a moral obligation to extend her willingness to fight, not only for herself or her family, but also for the greater family of unjustly oppressed people. The power generated by her prowess conferred a responsibility to serve, not an opportunity for gain. The code Xena had learned demanded that she fight for justice. She'd had so much potential for good.

It was 63 BC, and as the common-born daughter of a Thracian innkeeper, a wandering ex-warlord, and a failed conqueror, it was damn near hubris for her to aspire to any form of nobility at all. Nevertheless, after eighteen years of fighting, Xena's heart was ready to be the heart of a hero. And yet she was still a mortal, still the God of War's Favorite, and deep inside, she was still the Destroyer of Nations.

Thus began the "Middle Years" of the soulmates' journey, which began in battle and ended in tragedy. Five years hence, Xena would be drawn into a war with the Roman Empire that would open with a frenzy of vengeance and consume almost all of her remaining life. If not for Caesar, the world might have truly been changed by the hand of the Warrior Princess. Xena might have been remembered as a legendary hero.

Even so, it wasn't as though no one benefited from her aid. Over the years Xena had come to the rescue of many people in many places. She had led and served, offering her strength, knowledge, leadership, and skills to win a better life for oppressed persons regardless of their wealth or standing. If a cause tugged at her heart, she would fight, literally or metaphorically, for noble or slave alike. But in the end, it was not her good deeds for which she was remembered.

From the time of her death in 44 BC, to the final fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD, if Xena of Amphipolis was mentioned at all, she was recalled as "The Thracian She-Demon", or the "First Enemy of Julius Caesar". Generations of Roman citizens had regarded her as a barbarian savage, a bloodthirsty psychopath, and the slaughterer of countless gallant legionnaires. Later, in the Eastern Byzantine Empire of Constantinople, she was largely forgotten, and by the conquering Ostrogoths in the west, she was completely unknown. Though many had owed their lives and welfare to the Warrior Princess, Gabrielle's scrolls had been collected and hidden, and their stories were lost. Along with that best chronicle of her deeds, Xena of Amphipolis had been lost to history; her life eclipsed by the events and personalities of her tumultuous times. Had she lived to see it, the warrior wouldn't have been disturbed in the least. Among the many self-centered ambitions she'd outgrown was the desire to become a legend.

Staring at the temple from its gate on that long ago day had been uncomfortable. Being an ancient Greek, her frame of reference provided a wealth of ominous warnings. Had she been a hair more superstitious, Xena would have been cowed by the apprehension of finding Athena herself, and her father, Zeus, looking down at her with condemnation for what she would dare. As it was, their images were graven in the stone of the temple's pediment. Zeus sat enthroned, his great arms encircling his four immortal children, Ares, Athena, Apollo, and Artemis. Darkness and Light, Day and Night, their stern gazes were directed down on the portico where a mortal would be forced to tread. She felt as if they would see her as surely as if they were present. Portents of other gods were also evident to her eyes. For Xena, the dead lying all around had sanctified the ground to Hades, but the dryness proved that Poseidon had cursed and forsaken this land. Hephaestos had forged the chakrams that lay inside the temple. She saw nothing to directly evince the presence of Hera or Hermes, and of Aphrodite, all that was present lay deep in her heart.

Eventually Xena had roused herself and climbed the steps of the stereobate, reaching the stylobate and passing between the central columns of the peristyle. The spaces between the flanking columns had been inexplicably packed with piles of stones, all roughly the size of her head. Centuries of airborne grit had scoured away any traces of polychrome. Now the sun baked blocks of pale limestone stood naked, their décor reduced to a spotty pox of blackish lichen. The building had oozed a melancholy aura of age and dereliction.

The Temple of the Chakram was a smallish structure, built on a primitive version of the Doric order. The sidewalls of the cella carried the entablature directly, without side columns to form a pteron. The peristyle columns of the façade numbered only six, and these were squat, barely twice their diameter in height, with little taper and heavy capitols. The entablature measured vertically equivalent to the columns, and featured an oppressively massive architrave. It was, overall, a ponderous construction. The effect was one of crushing weight, constantly threatening to crash down. Xena had cringed at the necessity of entering it. A wrathful god could topple the edifice with a fingertip.

With so little verticality, the light coming through between the columns was minimal, and the interior space, the cella, was as dim as a tunnel. The temple could have been a fitting home for Persephone's bats, or an entrance to the underworld. Xena had stood for many minutes, allowing her eyes to adjust to the darkness, before she'd even been able to discern the altar that squatted in the shadowed depths along the back wall.

The Warrior Princess had cautiously advanced into the cella, feeling her way with her toes through an inch of dust, and hoping to keep from tripping over any more cadavers. The room was barely twenty cubits deep, and halfway there she'd jerked to a halt. Perhaps her eyes had finally finished adjusting to the darkness. Perhaps being closer had granted her the sight of the altar's details. Either way, Xena had been struck by a visceral terror that stopped her in her tracks. The altar was a living Hecatoncheire, an immortal hundred-handed son of Gaia, older than the Titans. Fifty of his hands had been loosely chained to the floor by Hephaestos. The other fifty bore weapons...swords, shields, and spears. Several had been poised to fling rocks the size of her head. Xena's vision had contained no such creature. He had eyed her for several moments before speaking.

"Like you I have only darkness. If you would possess light, then grant me the same. Otherwise, slay me if you can or get out before I kill you."

The voice was rich and beautifully melodic, almost soothing, and more surprisingly, it was understandable. Xena had gulped in amazement. The Hecatoncheire had spoken Attic Greek, a language she understood well since her home city of Amphipolis had been founded by Attic Greeks from Athens. Because she had no desire to slay him, die, or leave empty-handed, Xena considered his words. He'd obviously referred to both the chakrams and his living conditions. In that she couldn't blame him a bit. The temple was dismal, being chained here for centuries would be a miserable fate, and a fire wouldn't do him any good since he couldn't leave to find more wood. She'd squinted into the darkness as she'd pondered the situation for several moments.

"Okay," she'd agreed, "I've got a plan." Xena had fearlessly walked over to the deadly ancient creature and shared her idea. Like any good plan, it split the risks and demanded mutual trust for mutual gain. The Hecatoncheire had chuckled and nodded in acceptance.

Ya must've been crazy to do that, the modern clone chided herself as she remembered the incident, or maybe the thin air had affected the flow of blood to your brain. I wonder how Callisto managed to get the Chakram of Night from him? She never was one for teamwork.

"Well, we just crossed above 8,000 feet," the God of War commented as he paused to look downslope. A narrow cleft between ridges provided a slim slice of panorama. Far below them in the hazy distance it was just possible to make out the reflected light off the Bay of Alexandretta. Ares' comment brought Xena out of her musings.

"Are you sure?" She'd have guessed their present altitude to be no more than 7,000 feet.

"Oh yeah," he said, "no question about it." His face held the hint of a grin. "Does the walk seem easier this time, Xena?"

The warrior wasn't even winded after three hours of steadily hiking the steepening uphill grade. Could she have misjudged the land so badly on her first trip? She took a careful look around. They had already passed the spot where she'd camped on her first night after leaving Gabrielle and Eve, and that meant they were over halfway to the notch. Xena quickly walked forward around the projecting shoulder of a ridge, and sure enough, there it was. Several thousand feet above them the skyline showed a wedge of blue, like the gap of a missing tooth, above an escarpment of four hundred feet. On the far side of that gap sat the plateau that held the temple. On the near side lay seven miles of trail, climbing in meandering switchbacks that grew from the path at their feet.

_(Perhaps some readers have had the opportunity to hike in Arizona's Grand Canyon? From the south canyon rim, a trail called the South Kaibab leads down to the Colorado River. That path descends from 7,200 ft. to 2,500 ft., in 7.1 miles. The editor attests that the air at 7,200 ft. above sea level had no detrimental effects on a sea level acclimated metabolism, however the walk is much easier going down than coming up, g . The editor will also attest that the air at 10,000-ft. does affect a sea level acclimated body. Somewhere above 8,200 ft. there is a threshold region. Walking becomes progressively more difficult to those unaccustomed to the thinner air. On their 15-mile path up the Dibek Daglari to the Temple of the Chakram, Xena and Ares were climbing from Cokak, at 3,600 ft., to over 11,200 ft. at the notch.) Editor _

"I remember struggling for every furlong," she told him, "and it took me half a day to get here. We just passed the place where I camped the first night out, and reachin' the notch took me six candlemarks the next day." She checked her watch. "Today we've spent three hours to come half the distance, and it's higher than I'd thought."

Ares had smiled at her. "It's so much easier when you're not fighting yourself."

She'd shrugged in response and they'd resumed their hike, the clone pondering, the god eyeing her covertly and assessing her transformation with admiration. It had been so long since a warrior of her caliber had knowingly taken up his cause and accepted his Blessing. He'd spent all the years of her original life hoping for this, yet at the same time he'd been content to let her make her choices...though he'd always let her know there were options. In a long lost time and place, she had been born and trained for this.

"From the sucker of a barren tree comes the fruit once promised in the seed, and it's all the sweeter for the unexpected flowering." His words were whispered too softly for even her ears to hear, and her focus was turned deep within.

Xena could only wonder if the strength and stamina that she felt right now had also been available to her in her original life. Was the simple act of embracing the killer within her so profound that it could unleash the benefits of her divine heritage? No. That alone had never been sufficient. She had reveled in the bloodshed and slaughter during her years as a warlord. She had freed that aspect of herself to exact revenge after she'd become the Warrior Princess. On the day that she'd led the Amazons against Pompey she'd been unstoppable. Even at those times she had never felt so strong. What was different now?

In her past life, whether she'd been tied to human ambitions or warmed by human love, the Destroyer of Nations had been but a facet of her identity as a mortal. It had always been that most belligerent fragment of Xena. As a warlord, the goal of conquest had guided and limited the Destroyer's rage. In all the years since abandoning her army, she'd had Gabrielle's influence to ameliorate her martial heritage and facilitate her ability to cleave to her human inheritance. She had used only the shadow of her potential.

But now all that had changed. Xena's daughter had been brought back, only to torment her with a lost possibility. Her soulmate had been slain by the same evil, and that evil wore the face of a goddess who was vying for supremacy over mortals in an age long past her rightful time. For whatever reason, the Goddess of Wisdom had made a costly strategic error. She had negated the controls on the one who had been called the Hellenes' Bane.

Xena's clone wasn't simply embracing a violent aspect of herself anymore. She was no longer unleashing the killer for the duration of her rage. The heartstrings that had bound her to her human self had been sundered by the same sword that had taken Gabrielle's life. The Destroyer of Nations was no longer a fragment. She was no longer part of a whole. Now Xena was the Destroyer of Nations. She was the mirror image of the Warrior Princess, seen through a glass that reflected back her divinity, not her humanity. All the abilities that the blood of the gods could provide were hers by birthright. She was the killer, the general, and the child of war. Xena's clone finally understood that she was something her original self had never been. For the first time, she would truly be the God of War's Favorite and function as his mortal personification of war. The Destroyer of Nations would be uncompromising, unceasing, and merciless in battle, and she had her enemy. She would wage war in the modern world while bearing an ancient rage, and with the Blessing of her God, she would become its Conqueror.

She hadn't even noticed that while reaching this understanding of herself, she'd paced on up the path as easily as if she'd been strolling a sidewalk outside her house in Columbia. Without the slightest discomfort, Xena passed 8,500 feet. The notch lay six miles ahead.

_**November 10, 2001 - Incirlik Airbase, Turkey**_

In his office, CO of the Incirlik Airbase, USAF Brigadier General Lester Thatcher couldn't believe what he was hearing. A phone call had come from Washington, from the Air Force Chief of Staff no less, who had personally ordered him to comply with whatever demands the recently arrived CIA agents required. This apparent "blank check" had Level 1 authorization...from the Oval Office. Gen. Thatcher had heard about the agents' arrival in the F-15, and suspected they'd hatched a similar reckless scheme involving more expensive war material. Maybe they wanted to take an F-117 to Ankara?

When they arrived, the CIA agents actually appeared to be serious operatives, with the typical intensity of seasoned field agents. The pair seemed to be fully involved in the gravest of missions. If anything, he'd expected to see more evidence of stress. The two men entered his office and calmly presented their credentials. Then they quickly seated themselves and got right to the point.

"We need the immediate use of an AH-6J for spotting purposes," Harry Tasker said, "and authorization for a pair of F-16Cs armed with GBU-12 MK-82 laser guided bombs to be standing by."

The general gaped at the agents. They were obviously planning to do reconnaissance from the small helicopter and then call in the jets for an airstrike. Their request for 500 lb. precision munitions suggested a restricted size target rather than something large or heavily hardened. It also suggested a stationary target. They hadn't asked for missiles.

"It's perfectly safe," Albert Gibson confided, "there won't be any opposition aircraft."

What was he planning on attacking, a refugee camp? A rural village? A hospital? The general had begun to wonder nervously.

"Where's the engagement?" The general asked, curious about the mission radius and worried about the political repercussions. Syria and Iraq to the south were both hostile.

"Probably within 175 kilometers," Harry confided.

"In Syria?" Gen. Thatcher was beginning to dread this operation. These agents could very well precipitate a war between Syria and Turkey. That would be very bad.

"No, General, we won't be causing a war with Syria," Al said, appearing uncomfortable. General Thatcher raised an eyebrow. "The strike will probably be in the Dibek Daglari."

"In the Dibek Mountains?" The general actually choked. He sputtered and swallowed. "That's right here in Turkey!"

"There's a downside to everything," Al admitted, "but it's a pretty quiet area."

The base commander couldn't believe the scheme these CIA agents had come up with. They were planning to bomb the sovereign territory of an allied nation. His career was over...he just knew it. The Turks would riot when they found out.

"This operation is in support of American agents on a very important mission," Harry said. Gen. Thatcher gave him a questioning look. "It really is a matter of life and death. Unfortunately, everything's highly classified," the agent said with an expression of regret, "I'm sorry, but I can't tell you anything more."

"Sir, national security is at stake here," Al added. "I believe the Air Force has extended its cooperation to us. The use of your resources is vital."

Insane as he thought it was, the general was a soldier and he had his orders. The Air Force Chief of Staff had personally conveyed the directive. He really had no choice but to comply. Brig. Gen. Thatcher just wondered if anyone in Washington had any idea of what these two agents had planned. Finally he tossed up his hands in capitulation and punched a button on his intercom.

"Col. Blake, please come to my office," he ordered.

A moment later the door opened and the colonel entered, snapping off a salute. He thought the general looked a little...tired.

"Colonel, these gentlemen are with the CIA," Gen. Thatcher said, "and we are under orders to assist them. They need to borrow a Little Bird and an armed pair of Falcons. They'll fill you in on the details. Give them whatever they need."

The colonel stared at his general in dumbfounded silence, then turned and stared at the agents in disbelief. The two CIA agents rose from their chairs, and thanked the general. Col. Blake ushered them out of the office and they headed towards the operations center.

_**November 10, 2001 - West of Cokak, Turkey**_

While the Omega Sector agents had been busy at Incirlik, the cloned Destroyer and the God of War had continued walking up the path into the Dibek Daglari. Another three hours had passed and they had reached 10,500 ft. They were within a mile of the notch, and Xena hadn't slowed a bit. She wasn't suffering from the thinning air. In fact, most of the way, she'd been planning the upcoming campaign, her footsteps guided by her split consciousness as her focus remained attuned to her thoughts. Finally she broke the silence and revealed what she'd decided to do. She'd have years to prepare the battlefield.

"Ya know, Ares, after I take the chakram, I'll have to lay low until Harry has my army ready. The biggest immediate task will be procuring weapons and support."

"Yes, you'll have to stay out of sight," Ares agreed. "Athena will be busy cementing her base of power before she can openly proclaim herself, but she won't forget about you. If she or her Champion can find you they won't stop until you're dead. I'm not sure why she's so intent on taking you out, but she'll be a constant threat."

"Even so, I can't do nothing. No army can function in a vacuum."

"No, it can't," Ares agreed. "You'll have to form an intelligence network, create a system of supply, and find a way to train and hide your troops until you're ready to strike."

"The same stuff as always," Xena nodded in agreement, "I remember."

"And there's another thing," Ares told her with certainty, "while you wait for your army, you've got to keep an eye on science. Whenever something new appears you have to be aware of it and ready to capitalize on it. Anything that could become a weapon is better off in your hands than the enemy's, so at the very least, if you don't gain an advantage from it, you won't be at a loss."

"I know," the Destroyer assured him, "there is no substitute to being prepared."

"I can tell you about two things I've noticed being developed," the God of War said, "the first is 'Chameleon Cloth', the mimetic fabric. It contains a sensor network woven into it that samples the nearest part of the environment; its colors, light and shade, and movement. The sensors send their data to a processor that signals the fabric to match the data's reflectance characteristics. The wearer is rendered almost invisible. It's being developed for deployment by US Special Forces ground troops by this decade's end. The second thing is a possible method of troop transport that will be faster than anything you can imagine. Remember how long it took you to get from Columbia to New Zealand?"

Xena nodded her head "yes". Starting at dawn, she and Gabrielle had spent most of a day just crossing the continental United States. That night had been spent crossing the Pacific. They'd arrived in Auckland in the mid-afternoon, and they'd been exhausted.

"You could make that trip in two to three hours. You could reach anyplace on the globe within three."

The cloned warrior looked at the god in utter disbelief. During her original life, three hours' travel at top speed meant running a horse to exhaustion to cover perhaps fifty miles, and that on a paved Roman road. With several horses in a relay one might make seventy-five miles and not kill her mount.

"How?"

"There is a theory being tested, in which a specialized jet engine runs at supersonic speeds...all the air and fire within it moves faster than the speed of sound, and there are no moving parts. If you rode such an engine, you'd leave the screams of your enemies behind you on the wind."

"And how close is this engine to being built?"

"The scientists claim it will take decades," Ares told her, "but do not make the mistake of believing them. They first intend to use it for artillery projectiles and missiles. For use as human transport, they lack money and motivation. Still, they are close...perhaps within a year or two of having a working engine, and maybe four years from building a missile...maybe less."

Xena spent several dozen strides digesting Ares' news. It opened numerous possibilities and suggested strategies to her. Neither were things she'd want to face in an enemy's hands.

"I will watch...and I'll acquire the loyalty of those who are involved. The products of their labors will be mine," the Destroyer declared.

She was deciding on how to bring the best minds to her side and leave Athena with the dregs. A few years in development time would make all the difference. It would be even better if she could arrange a late phase sabotage of her opposition's facilities. Let them waste their time, she thought, and the more time they waste the better.

"There is one more thing," Ares said, interrupting her scheming," you must have at least one proprietary tactic. It must be something no one is working on...something that no one else suspects can be done. This is the factor that will assure your victory. It will be the weapon for which there can be no countermeasure because the measure itself is unsuspected. Find it and then bury it deep."

Xena listened carefully to her patron god's wisdom and found herself in agreement. When the time came, the makers of the weapon and all who knew of it would be killed.

"Make no mistake, Favorite. You are facing a goddess, and that enemy is the Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare. She was once _Strategos Hypatos_ to Zeus himself and all of Olympus. Athena will have her own secret weapons; you may be sure of that." Ares paused and looked her in the eyes, binding her attention to convey the absolute necessity of what he was telling her. "Without a deciding factor, your chances of prevailing will be slim. With such a factor, you will change a costly uphill battle that could stalemate or bring defeat, into a decisive and unequivocal victory. Xena, in this war there can be no satisfactory outcome short of total domination. There is no place to retreat to and there will be no second chance. When you face Athena in battle, it must be with the absolute assurance of your complete victory. The battle itself will be decided quickly, perhaps in no more than a candlemark. There will be no place for shame or mercy; annihilate them all. Afterwards, there will be no place in this world for her...only you."

She had never seen Ares so certain of a goal, and in all her years of waging war, she had never opened a campaign without doubt. This time would be different in so many ways. Afterwards there would be no place in this world for Athena, Xena would make sure of that, but there was already no place in this world for Xena herself. There never had been.

"Do not open the war until you are ready, but when you do, end it quickly with overwhelming force," Ares added, "and always be aware that time runs against you."

It had always been so in the old stories of mortal against immortal. And how many times in all those stories had a mortal prevailed? Not often; not often enough. Perhaps that very fact could become a key...a weapon.

The cloned Destroyer came to a halt and Ares stopped beside her. The path had ended at 10,800 ft. Before them stood a near-vertical face of broken sandstone, threaded with natural cracks, loose boulders, and small shelves. Four hundred feet above their heads lay a gap in the ridge at the top. This was the notch they'd been making for. Beyond it was the continuation of the path from Cokak, which led down to the plain and its temple.

Xena eyed the surface carefully, recalling her original route up. She quickly saw that the endless repetitions of freeze and thaw, the abundant wind and infrequent water, and the occasional seismic tremor had almost completely recut the stone. The intervening two thousand cycles of the seasons had altered the topography enough that most of what she remembered no longer applied.

For several long minutes Xena searched for a new line of ascent. It wasn't a matter of "if", only a need to discern "how". No fortress was impregnable and every redoubt had a weakness. As she regarded the broken surface, a grin curled her lips. There was a route that could be free soloed, climbed without the aid of ropes, safeties, or a belayer...just as she had always climbed in the past. It had been one of the earliest skills she'd acquired as a young girl, conquering the cliff faces above the Stryma River near Amphipolis.

Ares had taken a seat on a boulder after having a cursory look at the cliff. It was roughly the height of a thirty-story building. When he saw Xena nod to herself and break her gaze from the rock face, he asked, "I suppose you want to do this the hard way?"

"It's a beautiful day for a little climb and it'll give me some more time to think. I'll see ya at the top."

The God of War gave her a smile and then swept a hand upward in a mocking gesture that said, "after you." Most mortals would have been terrified of tackling a four hundred-foot vertical without even a change of shoes, but not Xena. As he watched, she chugged down some water from a bottle, settled her backpack, stamped her feet, and then executed a standing front flip that landed her on the first shelf, a dozen feet above the path. From there, she latched onto a protruding rock and hauled herself over the top into a narrow gully that would serve as the start of her first pitch. A spattering of small stones cascaded down around the God of War. With a chuckle, Ares vanished in his trademark crackle of blue light. He didn't immediately reappear at the notch.

The cloned warrior worked her way up the gully with assurance, moving one point of contact at a time in a steady rhythm that ate up the distance foot by foot. She didn't really keep track of time. The climb would take as long as it took, and in the meantime, she could plan. To actually not be concentrating fully on her ascent might have seemed an example of insane overconfidence, but Xena had sometimes found that things actually went more smoothly without the interference of unnecessary decision making. Like any good leader, she knew when to delegate responsibility, and in this case, she trusted her body to handle the challenges that the cliff imposed. Soon, a hundred feet lay below her.

As she climbed she thought of the recent past, since it was the foundation for the future. She had made some friends in Columbia, South Carolina. But friends, she thought, were an extravagance she could no longer afford. Now all that the clone needed was allies. Harry and his people would be useful for a while, but eventually they would no longer be necessary. She didn't trust them and they would probably have to end up dead.

Among the other friends she'd made in Columbia were her students, one already dead, while the rest were simply insufficiently competent to wage war beside her. Those students were of no foreseeable use in the coming battles and they had no place in her plans. Like any other civilians, they might live or they might die. Like the house where she'd lived with Gabrielle, she would probably never see them again. All of that was part of an earlier life, a simpler life that had little bearing on the future. It had been the life of the cloned Warrior Princess. For the Destroyer of Nations, it was just history.

There had only been one person Xena had trusted unconditionally and she was gone. Perhaps it was better that way. Gabrielle had never been comfortable with the Destroyer of Nations. The Destroyer's wanton violence had always shocked Gabrielle, and sooner or later, the Destroyer would have hurt the Warrior Princess' soulmate. In the past, that act would have left Xena at war with herself, an intolerable and self-destructive situation. Now that possibility was moot. Gabrielle was dead and there was no Warrior Princess.

Xena came to a stop and blinked. She had reached the midpoint of her climb and her body was asking for her attention. Above her the gully had stopped dead at the underside of an overhanging shelf. To either side of her were flat, nearly vertical faces with scarcely an indentation large enough for a handhold. The nearest crevice was an angled fissure of perhaps four inches in width that lay slightly above and twelve feet to her left. That fissure ran upwards for a dozen feet, before becoming the underside of an overhang where the cliff face had sheared away. Fifteen feet above her, and completely out of sight from her present position, a narrow shelf continued upward into an irregular cutting that would lead her near the top. She had seen her present position from the bottom and had deemed it the only tricky spot. If she could make this traverse as she had planned, the rest of her climb would be almost easy.

The first thing she did was drink her remaining water and jettison the empty bottle. It dropped end over end as she watched, falling and bouncing off projecting rocks before it hit the path a long way down. The second thing was to snug the belt and shoulder straps of her backpack, then tighten its compression straps. She checked the lacing of her boots and then wiped the sweat from her palms. Finally, she looked up. The edge of the overhanging shelf was weathered smooth, but it was sandstone, sedimentary rock composed of compressed sand, rather than more highly compressed and metamorphosed metaquartzite. She unclipped the chakram and with a few strokes, gouged out a shallow groove just deep enough to provide a handhold. Chips of rock followed the water bottle down the twenty stories of cliff, striking the bottom with a distant pitter-patter. As expected, the chakram's edge showed no wear, not even a scratch, and Xena reattached it to her belt. Then she replayed her next moves in her mind's eye and took a deep breath.

Reaching back up over her head, Xena settled the fingers of her right hand into the groove she'd cut. She tested the feel of it, hefting her weight. And then she freed herself from her other three points of contact, taking her body's full weight on the fingers of one hand. Quickly she swung her torso from side to side to build momentum, and then she launched herself to her left while spinning in midair. She crossed the twelve feet to the crevice and extended her arms and legs, converting the rotational velocity of her spin into momentum that drove her feet securely into the narrow crack and held her body against the sheer rock face during the crucial moment she needed to change directions. For that heartbeat, while the physics of inertia aided her, she couldn't have fallen off the cliff if she'd wanted to. Then the energy was dissipated by the impact and gravity began to exert its effect.

The Destroyer of Nations felt the pull of her weight and she let it bend her knees, coiling them and storing the energy. Then, from a three-quarter squat, she reversed her downward motion, using the sheer power of her legs. She drove her body upwards and to her right, launching herself off the crevice, and diving towards the shelf that waited fifteen feet above the overhang she'd been trapped beneath.

Her body reached full extension with her arms and hands poised for contact like a diver's. Every inch counted. Two hundred feet below, the path waited mercilessly if she fell short by a hairsbreadth. Xena focused on the shelf hurtling towards her, tunneling her vision and willing it closer. It took a heartbeat to cross the distance, a car length and a half at a thirty-degree up angle. It felt like an eternity as she hung suspended in motion above empty space while gravity and inertia waged war over her mass. Those forces were governed by laws of physics that Xena knew only with the intimacy of practical application. She couldn't have predicted the dynamics of her movement with the formulae of a scientist. She knew nothing of theoretical physics, but she understood those tenets viscerally, like a gymnast or an acrobat. Now she could feel her body losing its momentum, slowing, the force of her leap dissipating to leave her hanging motionless, weightless for a heartbeat, before gravity took her and she began to fall. For a fraction of a second she dropped. Then the fingers and palms of both hands slammed down, finding the rock just as she'd planned, and she clamped onto it with a bone-crushing grip.

In gravity's thrall she let her body swing down smoothly from her hands, with arms outstretched, and then she bent her legs upward at the waist. Like a pendulum her body reached the apex of it's swing and then the motion reversed. Xena straightened her legs to maximize the force of her motion, converting the energy she'd stored into velocity. The backswing brought her body up, raising her hips above the level of the shelf as she again bent at the waist as her movement slowed. For a heartbeat she hung frozen in equilibrium as her upward motion ceased. Then she kipped, kicking her legs straight out while arching her back and releasing her hands. Xena completed her transit with a flip that landed her solidly, with both feet planted squarely on the shelf, and her back to the cliff face. Without even a glance down at where she might have died, the Destroyer of Nations turned and made her way up the cutting that led to the notch.

After another twenty minutes of climbing, she pulled herself up over the last lip of rock and stood at 11,200 ft., her back to the distant Bay of Alexandretta, her face to the notch. Ares was nowhere to be seen. She took a dozen steps and looked down onto the rubble-strewn plateau, 400 feet below. For a fleeting moment she saw it through the eyes of her original self, staggering in the thin air on that day over 2,000 years before. She traced the path downwards, through the talus slope to the level, rocky field, littered with the corpses of warriors whose armor glinted in the sun. Past and present cross-dissolved, focused on those persisting highlights, and Xena's clone saw the same dead still arrayed in the brightness and desiccating air. It seemed as if the passing seasons of the mortal world had held no sway on this parcel of ground, and that it was as subject now to the immortal will of the gods as it had ever been in the past.

One thing had changed. The Destroyer's eyes raked across the field to where the temple had stood. Now only a pile of rubble marked the spot where a soul, already ancient in her time, had guarded the weapons that had helped bring about his defeat and servitude.

Perhaps it had been an earthquake that had finally toppled the structure. Perhaps some ancient tremor had shattered the temple's walls, collapsing the roof that she'd so laboriously perforated by prying out a half-dozen of the heavy, flat, marble ceiling tiles, and thus granting the Hecatoncheire his coveted light. Or perhaps it had been the gods' wrath, visited upon the site when it became apparent that the chakrams were falling, one after another, into the hands of human warriors.

Following over a thousand years of failure, mortals had won three of the weapons within the span of about thirty years. When Callisto had taken of the Chakram of Night, it must have filled the Olympians with anger and dread. Perhaps they had sought to protect themselves by forever setting the last "bright" chakram beyond human reach. They must have held their breaths in terror as the once Destroyer of Nations had taken the Chakram of Light in 63 BC. Xena had been masterful, violent, and ambitious, and worse, she had been in Indus, beyond the sight of the Olympians, for over two years. Had she not combined it with the Chakram of Darkness, she could have killed them all.

Xena's clone made her way downslope, descending the path to the plateau. As before, she moved without sparing conscious thought to guide her feet. From above she had seen the ancient dead, but she had also noted that none of the bodies bore gear that revealed evidence of any attempted visits later than her own. Save for the collapse of the temple, the scene was barely changed from what she had beheld on her first visit. Had Callisto been the last to come here? Had the secret of this place died from mortal memory with her? After the soulmates' defeat in 44 BC, Callisto had taken possession of the Combined Chakram, while leaving the broken Chakram of Night behind. The Romans had found its pieces, and Callisto wouldn't have kept her great trophy, Xena's Combined Chakram, hidden. No, more likely she had displayed it with glee, flaunting it as the spoil of her greatest victory, the realization of her lifelong ambition and obsession of destroying her enemy, the Warrior Princess. Knowledge of the chakrams would have persisted at least for the duration of Callisto's life and perhaps many lives beyond. Yet no one had come.

Her musings brought another point to light. The fight that she and Gabrielle had lost to Callisto, back in that alley in Rome, had been filled with surprises. Most of them had been bad. Now Xena contemplated yet another. Why had the Chakram of Night broken against her back? She had been wearing her scrollwork armor, wrought of hard bronze that could turn a sword stroke. Even if it had been sufficient protection against a chakram, the god-forged weapon shouldn't have cracked in two. It should have rebounded, though Xena actually suspected that it would have cloven the scrollwork and severed her spine, embedding itself in her body rather than breaking her back from the force of the impact alone.

Early on in her own use of the chakram, Xena had sometimes sunk it into the flesh of her enemies, but that had been before learning that it was just as deadly when the blow glanced off the target while slicing the flesh it struck. Developing her expertise had allowed her to strike multiple targets and recover the weapon immediately on the rebound. And that was another thing about Callisto's attack. The Chakram of Night should also have rebounded and returned to Callisto's hand when it hadn't lodged itself in her flesh. The clone realized that the Chakram of Night had not behaved like a chakram! She was surprised that she had never seen this clearly before. The blow that had incapacitated her on March 12, 44 BC could as easily have come from a heavy club or a strongly cast lance. Had the Cirran been so inept with her chakram that she'd never developed even the most rudimentary technical prowess with the weapon? If that had been the case, she would have been at an even greater disadvantage with the Combined Chakram. In fact, she'd have been lucky not to kill herself using it. Perhaps Xena's weapon had avenged her death. The Destroyer of Nations chuckled at the thought.

Now she abandoned her reminiscing, for her steps had brought her to the place where the pylons had stood supporting the temple's gate. Here she had rested, exhausted by her climb, daunted by the reminders of the gods, and needing to collect her resolve. Today her body knew no fatigue as she passed the fallen pylons and lintel. She saw before her the shattered remains of columns and walls, architrave and pediment, cornice and capitols, all lying heaped together in ruin. This very outcome had been prophesized by the structure's oppressive design from the day that its stones were raised. It was as though the temple had crashed down under the weight of its own atmosphere of impending collapse. Xena had been struck at first sight by a perception of its doomed existence; almost a premonition of the building's inevitable destruction.

She picked her way among the fallen stones and blocks, observing that the courses of the stereobate and stylobate that formed the foundation still lay flat and true beneath the rubble. Here had stood the façade with its peristyle of six squat columns, and among their broken drums, Xena noted the piles of rocks, throwing missiles for the Hecatoncheire. Here too lay the fragments of the bas-relief from the pediment, and among them the clone could make out the shattered figures of Zeus and his four children. Their fallen depictions seemed to summarize the sense of lost grandeur and faded glory that had accompanied their reign into myth, leaving nothing but aging stone to commemorate their power to an unbelieving race of modern mortals.

The Destroyer of Nations lowered herself to her knees, taking a closer look at the carved profile of the Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare. Her enemy's broken visage reflected calm confidence marred by a measure of cold condescension. Had she seen that expression on a living face, the clone would have perceived willfulness and overbearing pride. It was the look of someone whom she would revel in bringing down a notch.

"You'll fall more than a notch before I'm done with ya," Xena softly whispered. The accompanying look of raw hatred on her face would have frozen a mortal's blood.

Just a moment later the thin wind of the Dibek Daglari spun up a spiral of dust, forcing the Destroyer of Nations to narrow her eyes as it whirled specks of grit into her face. Do you hear me and disapprove, O mighty Goddess of War, Xena asked herself as she rose to her feet. The petit gyre spun itself out a few yards away and the breeze returned to its general pattern, blowing up from the lowlands past the edge of the plateau.

Xena stepped up onto the stereobate, the lowest course of the temple's foundation, and then leaped onto a fallen section of the architrave that had come to rest atop a toppled column's barrel. From there she crossed from block to block with the surefootedness of a mountain goat, jumping from one ruined element to another, and finally gaining a position at the top of the cornice. She was standing on a portion of what had been the angled roofline, and she could see across the jumble of what had been the temple's roof.

Beneath a sheathing of flat limestone tiles lay a post and lintel frame of a few marble beams. The primary beam had been a central spine that ran the temple's length, supporting the peak of the roofline. Several lighter beams had crossed the cella transversely below it. Augmenting this stone framework had been a greater number of wooden timbers that distributed the weight of the roof tiles onto the main beams. The supporting members of the architrave, (those primary lintels that ran around the building's perimeter atop the sidewalls and peristyle columns), as well as those remaining elements that formed the front and rear façades, the columns, and the foundation, had all been of sandstone.

The clone looked down at the displaced and cracked limestone roof tiles that partially hid the wreckage underneath. Here and there she could see cracked marble ceiling beams and some of the ancient wooden timbers. Most importantly, the Destroyer could discern that despite its collapse, there was still space hidden beneath the fallen roof. What remained of the cella probably comprised a haphazard sequence of irregular chambers, each partially segregated from the next by debris. Xena imagined a warren of dangerous spaces, home to spiders and rodents, darkness and dust, ever under threat of possible further collapse. Somewhere within that ruin lay the Chakram of Day, perhaps still guarded by the bones of the Hecatoncheire, but forgotten by the world.

Xena moved across the fallen slabs of the roofing tiles, picking her way carefully towards what had been the back of the temple. Here and there she noted a gap below a tilted slab or between a tile and a fractured beam. They seemed to beckon her, offering a dark entrance to the spaces underneath. As she moved, the clone's confidence grew, for the rubble seemed stable. Nothing shifted or rocked underfoot as she passed. The slight weight of her mortal body had no effect on stone blocks that weighed hundreds or even thousands of pounds. When she went down into the darkness to search for her prize, she wouldn't have to fear a collapse trapping her like it had the temple's hapless guardian.

When she reached what had been the rear quarter of the temple's cella, Xena began to look more carefully into every gap in the rubble large enough for her to crawl through. In some places she saw a few details where the sunlight penetrated below her, before the darkness swallowed all in shadows. Her investigation of possible entrances ended when she found an opening, roughly two feet by three, where a tile was missing.

Perhaps it was one that she herself had forced out of place when she'd trusted the Hecatoncheire to lift her the twenty feet above the floor. With her legs braced securely in his grip, her height had allowed her to reach the ceiling that had been set beyond his reach. There she'd wedged her shoulders against a half-dozen tiles, one after another, struggling against their dead weight until she'd finally displaced them upwards and left their places open to the heavens. She had created a sequence of skylights across the width of the temple, and across them the sun had tracked overhead. The ancient creature had finally been granted the light he'd missed for a millennium in the temple, and for an age in Tartarus before that. He had lowered her safely to the floor, and in gratitude to his "Light Bringer", he had delivered to her Athena's Chakram of Light.

Now the Destroyer of Nations looked down into the dark well below the shattered roof. She drew from her backpack a handful of Cyalume sticks, and after activating their chemistry with a snap, she dropped them down into the darkness. Their light seemed faint compared to the brilliant sun overhead, but by shielding her eyes and looking only downwards, Xena's eyes adjusted until she could see. By the dim chemical glow of the light sticks the clone could discern the floor eight feet below her, the dust and rubble strewn floor of the stylobate. She saw chains wrought by Hephaestos himself, and still constrained within the manacles at their ends, the bones of several of the Hecatoncheire's arms. She saw a shield bigger than any that a mortal warrior would bear, a javelin ten feet in length, a long sword almost her own height, and a mace with a flanged head that probably weighed twenty-five pounds. So, he was certainly dead. Probably killed when the temple collapsed. An ignoble death, she noted without sympathy, after a lifespan that might have encompassed eight thousand years.

With that thought, Xena took a quick step forward and casually dropped feet-first through the roof. Her legs absorbed the shock with a slight bend of her knees before she straightened back up. The clone surveyed her surroundings with all her senses. She could smell centuries of dust, dry and gritty at the back of her throat. Inside the ruins the sound of the wind was imperceptible and silence appropriate to a tomb held sway. On a deeper level, she felt no tingling warning of the presence of a god, heard no other mortals, and discerned no threats. A moment later the beam of a Sure-Fire M-3 Combat Light stabbed into the darkness as she made an initial sweep of the proximal area.

With the halogen light she could see that remains of the cella. A much-interrupted space had been formed by fallen timbers and ceiling beams, broken roof tiles, and stray stones from the sidewalls. Here and there, a pool of light penetrated down from some gap that opened to the sky, theatrically spotlighting another tableau of destruction. She swept the beam around towards the rear of the cella and saw the crushed skeleton of the temple's guardian. Sure enough, the main ceiling beam had fallen squarely on his torso when it broke. Tons of stone had dropped the twenty feet with almost surgical precision, leaving the Hecatoncheire's chest impaled by the end of a marble beam whose immense weight had cloven the floor below.

Xena stepped towards the Hecatoncheire's remains. She reached what had been a sunken area where the guardian had been hobbled and cleared part of that space, dispassionately kicking aside chains, weapons, and bones. When she'd freed the area she sought, the clone lifted a discarded spear and used it as a lever to pry up a flooring stone. The spear point shrieked as it bit into a small recess in the marble slab. With her weight multiplied by the spear's length, Xena raised the stone until it sat displaced over the one adjacent to it. She repositioned the spear and shifted the stone a little further until, inch by inch, she had moved it enough to clear a space just big enough to slip an arm and shoulder through. In this way, she gained access to the hidden vault that held the remaining chakram.

The flashlight beam shone down through the gap Xena had created in the temple's floor. Just a couple feet below lay a smooth facing of white marble and black diorite slabs. The four square slabs alternated colors, black and white, like a row from a chessboard. Each square was engraved with a ringlike depression and bore a symbol at its center. Both black squares and the white square between them showed empty depressions. The final white square held a chakram. Centered within its metal ring, a black symbol with a dot in the middle of a circle was inlaid in the white marble. It was the ancient glyph of the sun and it signified the god Apollo. Even an illiterate from the ancient world wouldn't have mistaken it. The weapon was surely the Chakram of Day.

Xena claimed it with a quick snatch, wholly devoid of ceremony and dictated by economy of motion. Her senses had begun ringing an alarm. She slipped the chakram into her backpack, then silently regained her feet and hastened to stand in the shadows beside the rectangle of light that poured through the gap in the roof where she'd entered. After a moment, she noticed the Cyalume sticks and kicked them out of sight beneath the surrounding debris. Faintly she heard the very distant sound of a helicopter's rotors chopping the air, and more closely, the movements of several sets of feet.

_**November 10, 2001 - Airborne Over the Dibek Daglari**_

The AH-6J Little Bird helicopter had taken off from Incirlik Airbase and immediately banked northeast. It climbed to 2,500 feet and sped over the coastal plains north of the Bay of Alexandretta, following highway D815, and heading towards the highlands that loomed like a brown wall ahead. At the controls, Harry Tasker pushed the Little Bird to 250 km/h, while beside him, Albert Gibson searched the approaching distance through 8 X 50 field glasses. The small helicopter's range of about 430 kilometers would allow them only a limited search time since their suspected roundtrip was about 350 kilometers. It wasn't a good situation, but only the Little Bird, almost identical in appearance to a civilian MD-530 or Alouette II, and carrying no external armaments, could fly over villages and towns without arousing unwanted attention.

After twenty minutes of flying, the Little Bird left the last of the agricultural lowlands behind. As it flew above the town of Kozan, the radio sputtered to life.

"Omega Sparrow, continue course heading 39° mag to coordinates 37°25'38" N by 36°18'43" E, do you copy?" Harry gawked at the radio while Al fumbled for a chart.

"Omega Sparrow, copy. Please identify, this is a restricted frequency," Harry asked. The voice had been that of an unfamiliar man. As Al pointed out their position and the one that they'd just been directed to on the map, Harry saw that the coordinates lay almost directly ahead. Who could possibly know where they were heading or what they were looking for? In fact, except for a few personnel at Incirlik, their flight did not exist. No one should even have known their call name.

"Omega Sparrow...trust me," the voice said with a dark chuckle, "scramble your fighters for a tactical strike at those coordinates and be there to direct the attack."

"Who is this?" Harry yelled over the noise of the rotors, but the radio had gone dead.

Now he was worried. If someone knew their plans and the position of their target, then they were a step ahead of the agents. Harry himself wasn't sure what he was looking for, or where it lay. If someone knew how to contact them, then they probably knew where the helicopter was as well. Harry searched the ground with a careful glance but saw nothing suspicious; no glint of reflected light off a spotting scope's lens, no truck with a radar dish pointed in their direction, and no trail from a shoulder launched missile.

Al made a choking sound and grabbed his shoulder, then urgently nodded forward. Harry looked ahead and grimaced, then he was pulling upward on the collective to gain altitude and adjusting the cyclic to raise the nose as the wall of the Dibek Mountains loomed dangerously close before them. Their forward view jerked upslope as the 'copter lurched upward, momentarily leaving their stomachs behind like a runaway elevator car. Harry was grateful that the AH-6J light attack helicopter was so responsive. He kept the heading constant, at 39° east of magnetic north on the compass, by controlling the tail rotor with the footpedals, while below the Little Bird, highway D815 slipped away to the north. Albert Gibson sat rigidly clutching at his chest, trying to slow his breathing. He could have sworn that the helicopter had scraped the ground with its skids. It was just such incidents that caused him so many misgivings about flying Tasker Airlines.

Below them a ridge was quickly rising. To either side, valleys were deepening and narrowing into gorges. The helicopter rose to trace the ridgeline; 3,500 feet, 4,500 feet, then 5,500 feet, and still it climbed to follow the land. Al breathed a sigh of relief and then typed the coordinates into the onboard GPS system. A moment later, a graphic display confirmed their position and destination. The expected transit time was less than twelve minutes. Harry concentrated on maintaining a safe altitude while Al searched the ground. Now there was nothing below the helicopter that hinted of human habitation; no roads, no farms, no houses or shacks. The land was too steep, too dry, and too difficult for surface travel. It was just barren rock, save for a few scrubby shrubs that appeared to be dried up and dead from the air. As far as Al could see, it was a wasteland.

As Al continued to hunt for anything unusual on the ground, Harry replayed the strange radio message in his mind as he piloted the Little Bird over the rising terrain. One thing he discovered, and confirmed by sneaking a quick peek at the chart, was that a road came within fifteen miles of the mysterious coordinates. It ended at a dot of a town called Cokak. More importantly, it sat at the end of an easy and continuous route by car from Iskenderun. It was possible that Xena and her companion had driven there and parked their Jeep before hiking the rest of the way. A thrill of excitement coursed through the agent. If Xena were headed towards the same coordinates he'd been given, then very shortly, he would arrive at the place that had been the repository of the chakrams. Harry wondered what Ray Fell would have given to see that site and discover the truth of what his colleagues dismissed as only a myth. He found that now, he believed what the radio message had said.

"Gib, call in the fighters," Harry ordered, "give them the coordinates we're using."

"Are you sure, Harry?" Al asked nervously. "We could start a war with Turkey."

"You got a better plan?" Harry chided. "We can always blame it on the Syrians."

Al groaned, but he got on the radio and transmitted the message. Incirlik responded.

"Harry, the F-16s are six minutes out. They'll arrive almost the same time we do."

The Omega Sector agent nodded and adjusted the collective for a more rapid ascent. The altimeter registered 8,800 feet above sea level. GPS calculated about ten miles to the target area. He nudged the cyclic, canting the helicopter's nose down and gaining a little speed. He wanted to have a look at the area before the F-16Cs dropped their ordinance. There wouldn't be anything left afterwards.

_**November 10, 2001 - The Temple of the Chakrams**_

Six sets of footsteps, the Destroyer of Nations was certain of that. They were moving warily over the rubble of the temple's roof, maintaining a prudent spacing between them, and even more prudently, remaining silent. Hunters, Xena thought, or assault troops. Without hearing their voices though, she couldn't identify a language or get an impression of whose troops they were. She could only assume that they knew she was present and that she was below them, somewhere inside the ruined temple. Yet so far, they still hadn't pinpointed her position. Here she held the advantage of surprise. They held the advantages of numbers and possibly of armaments. She continued to wait and listen, tracking their progress overhead. In the background, the helicopter was getting louder.

Xena crouched, as still and silent as a statue, drawing in her arms and turning her body so as not to reveal a recognizable outline. On another level, she had blocked off all projections of herself. The clone had long ago noticed that under some conditions enemies would walk right past her in broad daylight and yet not registered her presence. Conversely, the warrior had often benefited from a "sixth" sense that allowed her to discern the presence of enemies when her physical senses couldn't. It was a sense that grew from "that feeling of being watched", though it was infinitely more refined, and it partook of a transcendental state. It was a subtle thing, sensing without the senses, and the blocking against it was a skill that very, very few warriors she'd ever met had even tried to acquire. Xena had practiced this skill with her soulmate, playing hide and seek in caves and tunnels. Eventually Gabrielle had also mastered it. That ability had come in handy often, not the least of which was during their rescue of Eve, in the Eternal City.

"Becoming invisible" had allowed them to move within an arm's length of Praetorians when they'd invaded Caesar's palace, remaining undetected and insubstantial as ghosts, until they killed. The soulmates had moved steadily and quickly through torchlit corridors, as unstoppable as the night itself, and as deadly as a plague. One by one, they had silently decimated their enemy's bodyguards, eventually leaving most of those on duty, nearly 200 soldiers, dead in their wake. Had Caesar been present in his palace, the Warrior Princess wouldn't have spared him either. As it was, she had settled for sending him a clear message; _you cannot rest, my enemy, for even in your home you are not safe. I can strike in the heart of your city and wrest my prize from your treasury while leaving destruction behind me_._ Your hatred has brought the Bane of Hellas to Rome. _

They'd recovered Eve, then called Livia, from her very bedchamber, dragging the hysterical girl, whom they'd bound and gagged at first, behind them. When she'd finally calmed down and come to her senses, Xena had cowed her with threats and she'd grudgingly followed them out of Rome. Caesar's Champion had been a whining brat.

From a copse on the south shore of the Tiber River, beyond the city's wall, they'd heard the anguished howls of Praetorian officers in the palace on the Palatine Hill, bemoaning their discovery of so many dead. In the darkness, Xena had cupped her hands to her mouth and ululated a bloodcurdling Thracian war cry. That demon's wail had carried over the tenements and forums until it had assailed the Romans' ears, declaring Xena's vengeance and the fulfillment of her Oath of War. The twelve "Bloody Years" had finally reached their close, and in their wake lay over 125,000 dead whose souls had been forfeit along the road from Endgame to the Eternal City. The soulmates had eluded the Roman pursuit and hauled the spoiled Livia back to Thrace for her rehabilitation, though Gabrielle had very nearly killed her along the way. But that had all been in another life.

If the group Xena faced now were truly hunters, she knew they would have developed that sense too, even if they weren't aware of it. So as a precaution, she executed a kind of dissociation and "became invisible", just as she had in Caesar's palace, while tracking the footsteps above her as they moved past. At one point, the partial silhouette of a head appeared in the rectangle of sunlight that Xena had dropped through to enter the temple. The hunter even stared directly at the place where the Destroyer stood, shrouded in darkness, but her eyes passed the clone by along with the tumbled stones all around her. After a moment she withdrew and moved on.

Xena remained where she was, listening as the six above her walked to the rear wall of the temple and the helicopter suddenly became louder, probably as it crested some ridge and came into view. Perhaps some fortuitous passage between the fallen stones aided her by channeling sounds from the hunters down into the ruined cella. For the first time, Xena heard a few muttered words above her, and now she knew what to expect. She drew Gabrielle's short sword with her right hand and unclipped the Combined Chakram with her left. Then she moved to stand directly beneath the open sky.

Harry was tempted to follow the ridge to its top before turning downslope and reaching the coordinates, but then he decided to shape his course to the map and seek the place he'd been directed to. The AH-6J literally popped over the ridge 250 feet shy of the summit, and suddenly, there below the agents lay their first view of the small plateau, littered with bodies and the ruined temple. Facing them at the nearest edge of the collapsed roof were a half-dozen figures taken directly from some movie set.

Her ears placed the helicopter at the ridge crest, and the voices she'd heard placed her antagonists between herself and it. Now, while their attention was directed away from her position by a distraction, was the perfect time to strike. The Destroyer of Nations coiled her legs, took a breath, and then launched her body straight up.

She burst from the opening in the fallen roof as if launched from a catapult, confirming her enemies' positions as her head cleared the rubble. Xena held her body vertical to the top of her leap and then tucked into a front somersault that brought her down to a whisper soft landing, four yards behind the hunters. The beating of the helicopter's rotors covered the faint sounds of her boots as she charged, and in a heartbeat she was upon them.

A hard thrust with Gabrielle's sword bit through the flesh below the woven armor of a cloned Callisto's back. It passed between her ribs just to the right of her spine and severed her inferior vena cava. Xena wrenched the sword free and slashed a second Callisto's neck with the Combined Chakram, sending up a fountain of blood. She spun quickly to her left and slammed the ring-bladed weapon into the throat of a cloned Elainis who had already begun to draw her swords in response. The other three hunters, another Elainis and a pair of Mavicans, were turning to face her, leaving the helicopter forgotten.

Xena immediately flipped over the remaining Elainis. She drove the ventilated short sword into the nearer Mavican's throat, twisting the blade as she withdrew it and nearly hewing off her head.

The element of surprise had served Xena well, allowing her to dispatch both the two most unpredictable and one of the most deadly. She'd killed the Mavican clone simply because she could, knowing that when outnumbered, sooner was better than later. Now the advantage of surprise was gone, but the Destroyer of Nations was in her element. She was facing an enemy who could actually challenge her in combat. She didn't have the time to notice that she was moving far faster than she ever had as the Warrior Princess.

The second Elainis was already charging forward, her twin swords drawn in an instant, while the second Mavican was still drawing her sword and moving to attack from the opposite side. The cloned Destroyer of Nations spun to face the clone of Elainis, knowing that she was the far more dangerous enemy. With a detached fragment of her brain, Xena noted that the helicopter was standing off and observing, hovering beyond the edge of the plateau. Even mortal combat couldn't constrain her entire being, for she was something more than human, more than a god's Favorite, and yet less than a god.

Elainis opened her assault at full speed, with a flurry of blows that even Xena was hard pressed to turn aside. The twin longswords of Athena's Champion gave her the advantage of reach over Xena's short sword and chakram. Despite her disadvantage, Xena held Elainis at bay...barely. It was all she could do to fend her off while avoiding the almost clumsy slashes that Mavican harried her with from behind. An effective counterattack would be almost impossible. Getting within the whirling cyclone of those black blades that Elainis wielded with such consummate skill was going to be harder than slaughtering a centuria of legionnaires. The Destroyer realized that her only recourse would be to gamble on the unexpected. To that end, Xena searched her options. And somewhere far away, the detached fragment that still monitored the surrounding world reported a roaring sound that was rapidly growing to a scream.

Xena lashed out with a back kick that slammed into the Mavican's belly and drove her back. The Elainis allowed the hint of a derisive grin to twist one corner of her mouth even as she lunged with her right sword to capitalize on Xena's divided attention. It was in just such moments of peril that Xena had always pushed herself hardest and forced herself to excel.

Xena caught the sword's blade between the S-curve and the blade ring of her chakram. She clamped down on it by rotating her forearm to twist her weapon, locking Elainis' blade immobile, and then she braced her elbow against her hip and launched her body upward into an aerial cartwheel. The strength of Elainis' wrist was no match for the leverage exerted by Xena's entire body. The sword was wrenched from her grasp. It flew out of the chakram and through the air, clattering to the ground well beyond the ruins and far out of reach. Xena landed three yards away, teetering on the brink of a gap between two roofing tiles, before she recovered her balance with a small hop onto solid footing. The Elainis shook out her right wrist and then raised her left sword vertically to salute the unusual move that had disarmed her. She didn't shift the remaining sword to her right hand, but immediately moved forward to continue her attack. Even as the Destroyer of Nations raised her guard in response, she registered the rising pitch of the helicopter's rotors. Her head jerked up. Behind Athena's Champion, Xena saw the helicopter rapidly backing away from the edge of the plateau.

In that moment, the roaring Xena had noted just moments before crescendoed as two jets streaked over the ridge. They were traveling so low and so fast that they drew dust from the plateau up into their wake as they passed overhead, and the combatants had to shield their eyes from the grit. Their engine wash rolled over the fighters like the blast from a foundry's furnace. Still squinting, the Destroyer of Nations took five rapid strides to traverse the roof and flung herself into space, tucking into a double somersault and landing amidst the rubble of the temple's sidewall. She hit the ground running flat out, as fast as she could, desperately trying to put distance between herself and temple.

She managed to cover almost three dozen paces. The F-16Cs had rolled and backflipped and were coming in again, but this time much higher. She was still running, never looking back, when a brief whistle was followed by a blast that flung her off her feet. Somewhere during the instant that Xena spent airborne, deafened as her body was slammed by the concussion, a blue light flared. She never landed.

_**The Aether - Timeless**_

Flickering blue flash. Bright glow of gold. Four figures flared into existence in a swirling landscape of colors and vapor that is devoid of anything concrete which would provide a reference of time or place. The God of War held his Chosen draped unconscious in his arms. Before him stood the Goddess of Wisdom and her frozen Champion, burned and blasted by the tactical air strike. They were passing each other through a neutral space that no mortal may experience. Here, in the limitless aether, only an immortal soul may speak.

"Rescued your Favorite, brother?"

"She was already clear of the blast, unlike your Champion, sister."

"Perhaps she would have survived...for a while. But sooner or later she will fall."

"Maybe she will and maybe she won't, but you lost six today. Perhaps your hopes are ill founded."

"My hopes, brother? No. It is you who pin your hopes on a trick of fate that should never have been. If not for Alti, she wouldn't even exist now, Ares. Besides, she's the clone of Melinda Pappas, not Xena, and even Xena was never a match for Elainis."

"And speaking of Elainis...now I finally understand why our father called her an abomination. You brought a clone back to Mycenae didn't you, Athena? Even back then you defied the order of things and traveled time. Her fate was to die at Aulis, but you couldn't let her go. So who's pinning their hopes on a fate that should never have been?"

"It make no difference, brother. My hopes are as good as realized. Look at the world you fool! The worship of Wisdom and Warfare is the obsession of mortals! No, Ares, my hopes are secure. The world of mortals has chosen me, and it's all the more obvious because they've chosen me without even knowing it. Never has a god enjoyed such a pure mandate. You should have stayed safe in your tomb, brother. In this world, heroism and glory are impotent rivals for science and technology. Now mortals kill with the push of a button, using weapons of mass destruction and the tactics of deceit. They don't call it cowardice, they call it expediency and battlefield superiority. Soon there will be no place in this world for what you offer, Ares. Soon there will be no place in this world for you...or your Favorite."

"We'll see, Athena. We'll see."

Flare of Blue light. Efflorescence of gold. Swirling vapor fills the emptied space, and then...

_"So much was twisted and perverted..."_

_"...so much potential unrealized in the stream diverted..."_

_"...but even a god's meddling cannot undo what is to be ..."_

_"...and even a stream diverted makes its way to the sea."_

**Continued in Chapter 4**

74


	4. Clonefic Part 3 Chapter 4

Clonefic

Part 3 Chapter 4

By Phantom Bard

**For Disclaimer**: See Part 3 Chapter 1

_**March 28, 2002 - An Undisclosed Location in Washington, D.C.**_

Three men sat around a conference table in a room that the outside world didn't suspect existed. The atmosphere held guarded optimism in the face of an impending disaster.

"The assets have been secured, sir, and the mass production facilities are nearly complete," Albert Gibson said, referring to the progress report on the table in front of him. He looked up and saw approval faintly etched on Spencer Trilby's face. The man had aged a decade in the last few months.

"What progress have you made on the second phase?" Trilby asked Harry Tasker.

"Sir, we are ready to begin. The hair sample has been assayed and the genetic material has been isolated and amplified," Harry reported. "Cloning can begin at once."

"Very good, gentlemen," Trilby said with a sigh of relief. "You're sure she doesn't suspect anything, Harry? This is our only chance to have any shred of control over this whole sick bloodfest. There can't be any screw-ups."

"Sir, the second phase is being carried out incommunicado. There is no way to trace what is happening there. Like the mirror site, the system is fully automated and there are no living personnel. I can't think of a more secure setup."

"Okay, Harry, good work. Now, about the first phase..."

"Mass cloning began last week with acceleration technology being applied from the start. We have the first eight embryos, the _chiliarchoi_, at a stage equivalent to two months normal gestation, with the remainder at the blastula stage. Everything is underway at both the primary installation and the mirror site. And we also have the two augmented embryos as per her specifications."

For a moment the conversation died. Their "client" had supplied material, technology, and a researcher that most of their own lab personnel considered dangerously insane. He had begun splicing and inserting DNA the first day after he'd arrived, and the two "specials" were thriving just like the other clones. They were virtually indistinguishable from the first eight, but they were a cause for the highest level of concern.

"Sir, Xena's already uncontrollable," Gib began, "we've all seen the films. The fights at the school were bad enough...no one fights like that except that clone she calls Elainis. But then there's the helicopter footage from the temple. Sir, we've analyzed that footage frame by frame. Her initial attack...there are no clear images of her, and the shutter speed was 1/250th of a second. It's all a blur. No one should be capable of moving that fast. Now we're making 'specials' with genes from snails?"

"They're actually using just seven genes from _Conus striatus_, a piscivorous cone shell from the Indo-Pacific shallows."

"Harry, they're snails...poisonous snails. She's breeding them to be poison spitters?"

"She's not after the poison, Gib. She's after their speed. A cone shell injects its prey with venom by harpooning it, and the harpoon moves at close to 150 feet per second. A good black belt can punch at 43 feet per second. That's what she wants."

"And in the temple footage she was a blur. Discount the helicopter's motion and she was still moving at least two or three inches in every frame, probably more. That's her whole body, not just her fist, moving at 50 feet per second minimum...it approaches the human neural threshold. The 'specials' will move well over twice as fast as she does."

"Actually, Gib, they'll not only move faster than Xena, they'll react faster than she can...much faster. You see, the 'specials' will mature with their long motor nerves based on molluscan physiognomy...with far fewer synapses than in a normal human. Transmission time for a nerve impulse will be a small fraction of that in humans. That's much more dangerous. She claims their reflex arcs will allow them to dodge bullets fired from some handguns if the attacker is over twenty-five feet away. But that's not the point. They'll be able to draw a sword and cut your head off before you can even react to their first hand movement."

"Harry," Al asked in exasperation, "doesn't this bother you just a little bit?"

"Do you think you'd have a ghost of a chance against Xena if she wanted to kill you, Gib?" The other agent shook his head "no". "Then does it really matter if she's breeding special clones that can move even faster than she does? There's no way any of us can 'control' Xena. That's why there's a second phase. None of us may live to see it, but it's all we can do."

Spencer Trilby closed his eyes and reflected that in the end, a lock of hair could save the world. But there were so many "ifs"; so many details that could go wrong. He'd never played such a dangerous game. He was involved in a frontless war more deadly than the Cold War with the eastern block had ever been. There was an invisible arms race afoot, but he was only privy to a part of one side's efforts. His ally scared him witless and her enemy was beyond comprehension. And here he was, trying to doublecross someone that shouldn't even exist, without weakening her capacity to defeat an enemy that she claimed was a goddess. He felt as though he were trying to cheat card sharks in a game he'd only learned that night, with everything he knew and loved wagered on a single hand.

"Are you alright, sir?" Gib asked, prompting Trilby to blink and return his attention to the conference.

"Not really," Spencer replied with atypical candor, "but if I were, then I'd be worried. Do we have any way of keeping tabs on Xena? Of knowing what she's up to on a day by day basis? We don't have any real idea of her overall strategy or of her timetable, other than that she's given us four years to build her an army."

"Sir, we don't even know where she is most of the time," Harry admitted. "She contacts us, and if we need to contact her, then we place a classified ad in the Washington Post."

Spencer Trilby could only groan. Omega Sector was at an outsider's beck and call, and that outsider was the most dangerous person he'd even met. So far, Spencer Trilby had met Xena, exactly once.

She had come to their headquarters in mid-November, just days after his agents' mission in Iskenderun. She'd been dressed down to avoid attention, in a sleeveless white blouse, worn Levi's, and scuffed low-heeled boots, carrying an old trench coat in one hand and a battered laptop in the other. The clone could have been an office worker or a low-level consultant, but never had the sector chief sensed such a concentrated aura of personal power. It encompassed cold determination, absolute self-confidence, an unshakable commitment, and steely prowess, all in measures far beyond anything he'd ever encountered in his lifetime. Without consciously disguising it, her authority would shine through a pauper's rags, and on that day, the recreated ancient warrior had purposefully confronted them as a commanding general.

She had walked into the conference room with them and immediately taken his seat at the head of the table. She had never stooped to challenging him with eye contact or a contest of wills. The question of who was in charge and who would follow orders simply never came up, as if the question itself were moot. It was obvious that Xena had been born and bred to command, and like those around him, Spencer Trilby had felt a visceral compulsion to obey.

Just as Harry had, aboard the Gulfstream V over Columbia, he'd recognized her ability to inspire and inflame those around her through the sheer strength of her will. It was a quality; innate in any charismatic leader, but present in a degree possessed by only a few in all of history. Without knowing what it was, he felt Xena's projection of the Favor of the God of War. People would follow her blindly, not because she used scapegoats or demagoguery, but because by association with her, they could become part of her vision. Xena offered grandeur beyond mortal ambitions and the closest thing to immortality that the living can achieve; participation in world-changing events that would become history, legend, and someday, myth. Trilby had found her as horrifying as she was compelling.

She'd had no hesitation about making demands or laying out specifics. Xena began the discussion by unsheathing a dagger and slicing a layer of skin from the inner surface of her left forearm. Her face had registered only mild interest and not even a trace of pain as her blood welled up through the raw flesh. Setting the sample on the tabletop, she'd told them, "from these cells you will clone me an army of 8,000 warriors." It was an imperative, not open for discussion.

There had been more. On the laptop, she'd displayed images of the Soldier Systems Center, a part of the US Army Soldier and Biological Chemical Command Center, in Natick, Ma. The footage had been shot at night during an infiltration op that appeared to have been a solo intrusion into a secured military R&D facility. It showed the existing technology for a future battle dress uniform, encompassing a first generation cyber-mimetic fabric, and an onionskin-thin, breathable membrane called Pyrotect, that was unaffected by flames.

"Since you have access to government assets, you will acquire and perfect these technologies," she had demanded. The agents had looked at her in shock. The specifics of Natick's research were heavily classified and access to the facility was closely restricted. And yet her voice and the strength of will it conveyed brooked no argument. "You shall create battle dress uniforms for my army, using the Chameleon Cloth as an outer shell over jumpsuits made of BioSteel sandwiched with Pyrotect. My army will be fireproof, bulletproof, cut proof, and able to disappear from sight."

To herself she derisively recalled the Natick facility's motto, _Cum Scientia Defendimus_, (we defend with science). Science could be used equally easily for defense or offense. It was blind, deaf, and dumb, and like Death, it answered to any master without conscience.

She had turned the laptop momentarily and tapped several keys before showing them the designs for the clones' multi-layered BDUs. The technical specifications and procedures from the Natick research were provided in decrypted files that had been downloaded from the Command Center's restricted database before a corrupting virus had been introduced to their mainframe. Keyed to activate by the system's clock, it would remain dormant over a six-month period and then suddenly erase the allocation tables and lock the hard drives into a repetitive reformatting sequence while locking out all command inputs. The system administrators would have to physically cut off the power.

It was then that Spencer Trilby had really become aware of just how different this warrior was. As she'd spun the laptop back towards him, he'd noticed the inner surface of her forearm. Not only had the cut she'd inflicted stopped bleeding, but already, new pink skin had begun to seal the wound. Perhaps ten minutes had passed.

Again she had turned the laptop to access a file and then slid the computer around for a third time so the Omega agents could see it. The screen revealed the unremarkable face of a late middle-aged oriental man in a white lab jacket. They had gagged.

"I see you're familiar with Dr. Junichiro Kishihara," she had stated with the trace of a grin curling her lips. The agents were well aware that the researcher in question was wanted by Interpol and the governments of the United States, England, Germany, and Japan. He had done the seminal practical work on cloning for human enhancement, and he was regarded as both brilliant and insane. In hopes of creating a master race, the doctor had harvested countless human ovaries from kidnapped women. Usually he'd walked out of the operating room leaving the donor bleeding on the table while he hastened back to his lab with his prizes. "He's currently in my custody and will become a limited member of the cloning project."

Xena'd read the horrified disapproval on the agents' faces and stared them down. There was really no choice between ethics and practical necessity. War was no place for the weak hearted. She'd hardened her voice. "If we don't use him, someone else will. He'll create two special clones for me, an' that's all ya need to know."

Trilby knew that to have infiltrated Natick and taken Kishihara prisoner since returning from Turkey meant that Xena had been very busy and very successful. There had been no report of a security breach at the installation in Massachusetts. Kishihara had been wanted for six years. He had been profiled as a sociopath, utterly devoid of conscience or compassion, and yet he'd agreed to do her bidding. Trilby was more than impressed by what she'd accomplished in under a week.

Next they had discussed how the work would proceed, and again Xena had surprised them. She'd demanded that everything be done twice, at two facilities, with no contact between them, all according to her specifications. It was a dual-decoy tactic they all recognized. She anticipated and would accept a casualty rate of 50%. To assuage their concerns about the safety of their personnel, she'd agreed to the mirror site being a fully automated sacrifice. The meeting had ended shortly after that. She had left them with the laptop, the skin sample, and a parting statement that had chilled their blood.

"Failure is not an option in this war 'cause a goddess doesn't take prisoners and the lives of mortals mean nothin' to her. I'm prepared to die and you should be too. Perhaps if we're successful, there'll still be a world left that can heal itself, in a few hundred years. I'll be checking in with you from time to time, and Harry knows how to get hold of me if somethin' comes up. Be very careful. I'm counting on you and I don't like surprises."

The meeting had taken roughly an hour and she left without looking back. By then the shallow wound she'd inflicted on her forearm had completely healed, leaving only a pale telltale blemish where the new skin hadn't yet matched her tan.

_In your eyes  
Joy gives way to pain  
Save your tears for the rain  
Visions stop at the ceiling  
Without each other  
What would we be_

_In our minds  
We have weapons and cures for disease  
And a light year in the instant that it takes us to conceive  
Without each other  
Where will we go_

_  
_ (Partial Lyric from, "Strange Thing", Sophie B. Hawkins, ©2002)_  
_

_**March 28, 2002 - Gangplank Marina, SW Washington, D.C.**_

**Washington, D.C. - **During a White House press conference today, Press Secretary Bill Thurston announcedthat President Bush will be appealing to Congress for passage of a resolution tomorrow condemning the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. Thurston noted that the dictator had recently expelled UN weapons inspectors, while intelligence sources report that Baghdad is preparing to test a nuclear device. The President's resolution includes the controversial Hayes Clause, which would allow the United States to unilaterally respond in kind to any threat that includes a weapon of mass destruction. As a precaution, a spokesman for the Navy Chief of Staff has revealed that the ballistic missile submarines USS Harvard, USS Biloxi, and USS Alamo are now stationed in the Persian Gulf. All three are capable of launching cruise missiles armed with 200-kiloton W-80 nuclear warheads. The deployment was termed a "discretionary deterrent". The deployment met with universal dismay by the foreign community, however British leader Tony Blair applauded the move, saying that, "in this case, an eye for an eye makes good sense."

**Fredrick, Md. - **In a special press bulletin, Colonel Marrion Welsh, Chief of the Pathogen and BioToxin Weapons Division of the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Ft. Detrick, Maryland, confirmed that US bioweapons had been deployed in consideration of passage of the Hayes Clause. While the nature of the weaponized biologicals was not revealed, it is assumed that they were expected to counter reports of the Iraqi's development of weapons based on anthrax and botulism. Col. Welsh was asked if other agents are currently in use by the United States. His response was that, "Anthrax spores and botulism toxins are difficult agents to weaponize, and to be honest, they're very crude and not highly lethal. Anything we'd consider current would be based on aerosolized live cultures that could include small pox, Ebola Zaire, pneumonic plague, and certain strains of influenza. Such agents are either more highly contagious, are incurable, or have a higher rapid kill ratio." He refused to comment on what forms the agents were deployed in, or specify the delivery systems involved. Dr. Janice Ward of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia called the move, "...insane."

**Redmond, Wa. - **The Microsoft Corporation announced today that all future versions of the company's operating system software will include the "Federal Key", the court approved program upgrade that will allow open access by government agencies to all computers using the Windows operating system. The Key has also been engineered to be downloaded and installed automatically, and cannot be removed by the user. The Key is required by federal law, and failure to comply carries a penalty of one year in prison for each computer owned by a person or business. The Federal Key is part of the government's comprehensive initiative for national security in information technologies.

**Scott County, Ky. - **Vandals torched the facilities of a leading tobacco grower here sometime in the early morning hours. The blaze, which fire marshals have termed, "suspicious in origin", spread rapidly, destroying six buildings in under an hour. The act of arson appears to be part of a developing nationwide trend that has included: the lynching of a Los Angeles family in which the parents and two teenagers were all smokers, the bombing of a cigarette distributor's warehouse in Chicago, and charges of police brutality in Austin in which a motorist was dragged from her car and beaten after having been pulled over while smoking at the wheel. Readers may recall that just last week, the American Tobacco Co. appealed in Federal District court to overturn the Casey Law which would require all cigarette manufacturers to begin adding the chemical _beta-6-abraxas_ to their products. The chemical has been approved as a safe chemical sterilizer in humans. The additive is part of the government's comprehensive initiative for national health, in accordance with the recent Supreme Court decision that allows the government to pass legislation enforcing approved aspects of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as guaranteed by the Constitution. Conservative Justice Howard Reyes commented in the majority decision that, "...the government cannot be held accountable for guaranteeing life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness if it cannot control those pursuits through legal statutes and penalties." A funding measure for the additive is under debate in the House, and would raise the cost of a pack of cigarettes to $9.00 in most localities.

**Washington, D.C. -** The Federal Communications Committee, in conjunction with the House Select Committee on un-American Activities has instituted new broadcasting guidelines requiring all FCC licensed media broadcasting companies to provide for one hour a day of patriotic themes. The audio and video programming will be provided by a new government production facility that is to be funded by the National Entertainment Tax. A 4% levee on all movies, television, radio, and "hard" media, (books, DVDs, CDs, etc), will take effect on May 1st of this year. Religious, governmental, and approved educational programming is exempt.

**Sacramento, Ca. - **The controversial McKenzie Act was passed today by the state legislature with a vote of 142 to 16. The new law rescinds all private gun permits and makes possession of a firearm within the state a crime punishable by not less than 2 years in a state penitentiary. The McKenzie Act is described by liberal legal scholars as being an abridgement of the Constitutional Right to Bear Firearms, however the Supreme Court refused to rule on an earlier appeal, citing the fluidity of the Constitution as, "a living document that must react to the will of the people for the sake of their better interests in the present time.". Conservative politicians applaud the bill as the opening of the disarmament of violent elements in society, and have vowed to remove firearms from the hands of all except active military and police before the end of the decade.

**Detroit, Mi. - **City Council members have proposed a bill that would allow the Social Services Administration to require beneficiaries of public assistance to register for participation in pharmaceutical testing programs approved by the city. The program would allow the economically depressed city to recoup some funding by providing volunteers to several manufacturers within the state on a predictable and regular basis. The measure, in conjunction with corporate tax abatements to pharmaceutical companies, is hoped to entice a new industrial base to the city. The attendant increases in employment, income tax volume, and crime reduction are promising benefits of the program. Children under 10, the elderly over 72, as well as some handicapped individuals can elect exemption, however they can expect some reductions in benefits.

**New York City, N.Y. - **Police Commissioner Fields announced that beginning in April, all police patrols will be issued one automatic weapon for each pair of officers. The weapons, mostly HK MP5 submachine guns, will be, "... a valuable deterrent and logical next step in our vigilance against terrorism". Previously, only members of the elite Special Services division were regularly issued automatic weapons. The Commissioner also proudly reported that for the sixth year in a row, statistics for violent crimes are down, implying a quieter and safer city. However, "there is no way to predict when or if another situation _(like the September 11th attacks)_ may arise, and to that end, I think it benefits all citizens to have a police force that is prepared". The measure would have allowed the city to save on the costs of deploying National Guard troops on patrols during the last crises, the mayor claimed.

"Centralization of authority an' the constrainment of individual rights," an analytical voice whispered. "Society is transferring choice to the few actin' for the one who'll soon consolidate her power."

Pale blue eyes had scanned the stories in quick succession. In the comfortable cabin of a yacht docked in the Gangplank Marina at the foot of SW 6th St. in Washington D.C., the Destroyer of Nations sipped Classic Coke and waited for nightfall. Outside the 78-ft. Miss Artiphys, water slapped among hulls and voices rose from the fish markets on Maine Ave. Xena's new home afforded her both privacy and an unexpected locale. No one simply came to her door and the residents of the other houseboats and yachts had quickly learned that the tall woman had little interest in their company. She kept to herself, was often out of town, and showed not the slightest interest in their affairs. The marina employees she dealt with were discreet, being used to eccentrics, celebrities, and reclusive professionals. In fact Xena was barely considered remarkable, and though her boat was among the larger vessels docked in the marina's "T" slips, her "neighbors" included the Odyssey and the Presidential Yacht, the USS Sequoia.

She tossed the paper onto the upholstered bench and looked out through the windows of the bridge. The city's lights were coming on as evening darkened the sky to the deep cobalt hue she remembered embellishing traceries on the bronze helms of Corinth. Across the District of Columbia, thousands of hands flipped thousands of switches and PEPCO's grid obediently responded, heating filaments to life. Past the berths of smaller vessels moored to the west, Xena could see the round floodlit dome of the Jefferson Memorial, glowing amidst the clouds of cherry blossoms that encircled the Tidal Basin. Further off, the winking red safety beacons atop the Washington Monument floated over the mall. Above it shone the planet Venus, bright ancient Phosphor, both the evening and morning star, cycling from one guise to the other five times each eight years. The clone mused that in five years time she would engulf the world in night. Morning might follow or it might not. Perhaps then only the evening star would still shine.

Slightly over four months had passed since she'd claimed the Chakram of Day. In that time, Serena Pappas had disappeared. She had passed without an obituary, funeral, or memorial; the identity merely a thing deemed to be past its usefulness, shed like a snake's outgrown skin. Now a woman named Kori Polemos used the Pappas fortune to bankroll a plethora of high tech projects through an endless maze of shell corporations, foreign third party investors, fictitious consortiums, and hired frontmen. It all amounted to a slight of hand circus so diversified that she herself wasn't always sure of what her money was funding. It didn't matter much to her either. She paid a rabid pack of financial managers to masturbate her money and amass profits while creating legitimate paperwork for her tax records. It was only for the purpose of obscuring and profiteering, to aggressively generate capitol for her projects and maintain the reality of a diversified business conglomerate. At the rate she was going, a single year's worth of manipulations would keep a team of IRS agents busy for life. That was just how she'd arranged it; a kettle of fish so vast and complex that the true aim was entombed within a midden pile of transactions that could never be unraveled in a hundred years. Using the arcana of business, finance, and law, she had veiled herself from the eyes of a goddess.

It had freed her to oversee the Omega Sector's cloning of her army. Sixteen thousand warriors, each a carbon copy of herself, were being created in two locations. The first was at a secure site halfway around the world, so far from civilization, and so well camouflaged, that it was virtually undetectable. Sometimes she was still amazed at what money could buy in the modern world, and how fast it could be built. The second locale was a mirror site, fully automated and hidden in the last place Athena would expect it. Of the two, the Destroyer of Nations assumed that one would almost certainly be found and destroyed by the Goddess of War. It would probably happen in about three years' time, and it would happen because of a human error. Some breach of security would give it away, some single small slip. It would cost the lives of all the clones being grown there. Contrary to what she'd led Omega Sector to believe, she would willingly sacrifice the primary site and all its personnel. It would rid her of three liabilities at once and insure the ultimate success of the mirror site a year later.

The Warrior Princess would have found it hard to justify the creation of 16,000 clones of herself for any cause. To coldly anticipate the destruction of 8,000 of them, when the death of only one copy of her daughter had ignited her rage, would have struck her as beyond ironic. In her years as the Warrior Princess, self-sacrifice had become easier for Xena to accept than the suffering of a loved one.

To the Destroyer of Nations, any loss, any tactic, any sacrifice, was justified if it conferred an advantage needed for victory. One clone or 8,000, it made no difference. They were assets to be utilized in an uncompromising focus on the goal of her campaign. As the Destroyer of Nations, she would sacrifice a million clones, a million humans, or a million gods. If she alone survived, even if only long enough to see her vengeance taken and her oath fulfilled, it would suffice, and in the service of that end, there was nothing she wouldn't justify. She had allied herself with a murderous sociopath for the benefits his knowledge could bring. If insuring her eventual victory meant cloning an army, so be it. If the survivability of that army demanded the destruction of a duplicate army and her human allies, so be it. Collateral damage was acceptable. And if insuring her victory meant laying waste to half a world, then it would surely go up in flames. Even the surviving army of clones was only valuable for the service it could render to her vision. The great truth of her existence was that the Destroyer of Nations no longer felt real responsibility or kinship to any living thing.

Perhaps the greatest irony was that the Hellenes' Bane had already sacrificed her capacity to value the things whose loss had driven her to become the Destroyer of Nations. She cared nothing for the innocent victims of terrorists. She had no friends. A daughter would have been yet another asset to be used, or a liability to be shed. Love wasn't even to be considered. Even Gabrielle, beyond the benefits she could have provided as a bedmate or lieutenant, would have been expendable. To fulfill her oath and avenge the deeds Xena had suffered, the Destroyer of Nations had first sacrificed the Warrior Princess. Focused on her hatred for her enemy, she couldn't have cared less. She had much to do before the first clones were ready to be trained.

Of the clones who would survive to take arms, the first eight would be her_ chiliarchoi_, the commanders of a thousand. Below them would be their lieutenants, the eighty _hecatontarches_, commanders of a hundred whom the _chiliarchoi _would train. There were also her two "specials"; clones who could outperform her, blessed with inhuman reflexes and speed because the neural pathways in their bodies were made up of only a few dozen long nerve fibers, rather than the hundreds of much shorter fibers in a normal human. This was what she had revealed to Omega Sector.

The truth was that the mad doctor Kishihara had isolated the single mutated gene that differentiated Xena from all other humans. In doing so, he had studied it and discerned its mechanism. He had then applied what he'd learned to several other genes and created the 'specials". They would be more than quicker, more than faster, born with metabolic efficiency and regenerative capacities double those of a human athlete. No beings save the gods themselves had ever been more formidable. Their brains, however, were indistinguishable from Xena's own, and to control them, a special concept of self/other would be ingrained in their downloads.

The specials had very specific parts to play in her plans. They would act and react faster than any human warrior that had ever lived, certainly faster than any god would ever suspect, and just maybe, she hoped, also faster than a god.

But the clones were only one factor in the Destroyer of Nations' preparations for war. Within two weeks of her return from Iskenderun, she had obtained a sizeable interest in Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of Japan. Sixty years before, Mitsubishi had built the fighter planes called "Zeroes". Now they built, among other things, cars, transportation systems, machine tools, construction equipment, ships, energy systems, aircraft, missiles, and air conditioning. For their new major investor, they had reassigned a division of their Advanced Technology Research Center for next generation metallurgy and fabrication, to take on Xena's special projects. This miniature laboratory and clean-room factory would produce the eight thousand Combined Chakrams, the eight thousand long swords, and the eight thousand daggers that would arm her clones. Without understanding what they were building, they would produce other armaments and more besides.

Beyond these ongoing activities lay the search for emerging technologies. After making her arrangements with Omega Sector, she had quietly searched out the world's leading proponents of scramjet research. As she'd expected, one hotbed of activity was the US government.

A consortium of NASA and several private contractors had already lab tested what they called the X-43A. It was almost certainly a program that Athena was anticipating results from. Unfortunately, their first air trial the previous summer had been aborted when the booster rocket had gone off course, forcing the prototype to be destroyed. While they rebuilt the prototype, their plans included testing a miniature version of the scramjet engine by firing it from a special cannon sometime in the coming months. $250 million had already flowed into the project, and in parallel with it, the Office of Naval Research and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had lab tested prototypes with the intention of building hypersonic cruise missiles. They too would be testing an engine during the coming summer.

_( A scramjet, or _S_upersonic _C_ombustion _RAMJET_ engine operates without moving parts and carries no oxidizer like a chemical rocket. This allows a vehicle to be built with a fraction of the weight of a normal missile. Within the engine, all necessary oxygen to burn the fuel is scooped from the atmosphere, which travels through the engine at supersonic speeds. Such an engine can only operate at above about five times the speed of sound, 5 x 742 mph, or Mach 5, and usually relies on a normal rocket booster to achieve minimum speed. Its top speed may be far greater, depending on the materials, design, and management of the heat from air friction. Perhaps someday, such engines will help a reusable craft to achieve escape velocity from Earth.) Editor_

While the US government developed the X-43A and the Mach 6 cruise missile with Athena's Blessing, another group on the other side of the world were laboring with a fraction of their funding. The HyShot team, at the University of Queensland in southern Australia, had spent fifteen years working to create a testable version of their design. They too were hoping for an air trial in the summer of 2002. The previous October, the rocket they'd hoped would boost their test engine up to speed had gone off course. The booster rocket problem seemed to be a consistent factor in Australia and America, and Xena wondered if it was really only a coincidence, or perhaps something more diabolical. Maybe something divinely diabolical, she mused.

Tonight she would make her way to Reagan International Airport where she would board a commercial jet. Sometime tomorrow evening she would settle into a hotel room in Adelaide. The following day she would travel to the University of Queensland, where Kori Polemos had arranged a meeting with Dr. Allan Paull, head of the HyShot program. Before she left, he too would do her bidding.

_**June 1, 2002 -Woomera, S. Australia**_

Predawn chill seeped around a trailer that sat amidst floodlights in the open desert. It hummed with electronic instruments and human anticipation. Three researchers sat on rolling desk chairs, moving between stations to complete a checklist of prelaunch details. Behind them stood a tall figure wrapped in a dark brown oilskin duster, her black hair constrained by a drover's hat. Pale blue eyes snapped from one console to another, raking across the technicians with an unnatural intensity. As always, she radiated an energy that practically crackled from an invisible aura that the other occupants of the trailer could feel like a fire's warmth at their backs. It was something that they still weren't completely used to. Like the research team, she had been awake since early the morning before, yet no trace of drowsiness diminished her concentration on the activity around her. Kori Polemos waited for dawn and the launch of the test vehicle that her money had funded. Its image glowed on a monitor, fed from a surveillance camera.

A quarter-mile away from the trailer stood a launching pad. Its triangular steel launch rail was inclined six degrees south from vertical, and clasped to it was a two-stage Terrier Orion Mk 70 sounding rocket. Under a conical breakaway shroud atop the booster nestled a four-foot prototype of a redesigned X-43A scramjet engine. It would be launched without publicity, and without outside oversight. Kori Polemos briefly recalled her meeting with Dr. Paull three months before.

"I have a proposal for you, professor," she had announced, wishing for a cold Coke after sipping from an abominable cup of coffee. "I know your research is hampered by financial concerns...I believe you have even referred to your project as a 'scrounge jet'." She'd allowed herself a grin in answer to his own. "I have been empowered to enlist your group in a secondary R&D program, made possible by extra-budgetary funding at NASA. The program I propose will benefit you by allowing your group to gain hands-on experience with the X43-A prototype, while allowing my associates to escape media scrutiny."

The professor had sat speechless for a moment. Xena could understand his shock and see his elated anticipation of getting his hands on the American engine design. She could even have pinpointed the moment when he began to consider the secondary factors attendant to her offer.

"Why would NASA need to come here for secret testing, when they can utilize US military facilities for that?" He'd asked suspiciously. "Much as I'd love to get a look at the design, I can't see them giving away the primacy they've achieved in this field."

"The US military, that is the ONR and the DARPA have their own program, as you probably know. They are annoyingly proprietary of their facilities and physical assets. I believe they see us as competitors for funding, media coverage, and congressional support. As it is, they try to undermine the NASA program at every opportunity. If they learn that we intend to test a small-scale engine, they'll feel threatened by a project that will overlap their cruise missile engine in scale and possible applications. We cannot compete with their existing mandate, so our program has had to seek outside facilities and funding." She'd sighed as if she found the infighting tiresome. "It's a simple case of bureaucratic rivalry, and science can't compete with defense for government support. We're already reeling from the last decade's budget cuts." She projected just the right mixture of enthusiasm, resentment, and hope. It was an Oscar-worthy performance.

Her argument had swayed the under funded Australian researcher. He could understand the situation perfectly, and he sensed a commonality in their situations. Dr. Paull couldn't help feeling sympathetic towards the beautiful American who had identified herself as a NASA project administrator. Financial resources were much more likely to be allocated for military usage than for research. He'd seen it often enough himself in Australia and her country was worse. Successive governments had gutted the agency that had once proudly sent men to the moon in response to a president's challenge. Allan Paull remembered sitting in his home as a child, watching in rapt amazement as the Untied States had launched first the Mercury, then the Gemini, and finally the Apollo spacecraft. It was the vision inherent in those achievements that had determined the course of his life and led to his present career. Now those same people were asking for his help.

"Ms. Polemos, I would be glad to hear the particulars of your agency's proposal."

The funding had come in as promised. Twenty days ago, a guarded shipment had arrived from the United States, containing a test vehicle that was a one-third scale duplicate of the $250 million X43-A. At 4 feet in length and 300lbs, it could be launched by the same rocket booster he'd been using for his HyShot program. Accompanying it had been the Terrier Orion booster.

The Terrier first stage had originally been created by the US Navy in 1951, to launch the W45 warhead, an atomic ordinance with a nominal yield of 1 kiloton. The Improved Orion second stage had been a reliable NASA booster by itself, and would help drive the payload to an altitude of 300 kilometers. Since 1994, the Terrier Orion two-stage composite had been a proven NASA satellite launcher. Dr. Paull had seen that the NASA logos on its sides had been overpainted with white for the sake of anonymity. Kori Polemos was serious about discouraging unwanted attention. It was consistent with her choice of Woomera.

Nowadays Woomera was almost deserted. The actual town hosted less than 200 full time inhabitants. Its name came from the aboriginal word for a spear-thrower, a notched stick that held the butt-end of a spear and extended the thrower's arm length to increase the power of the cast. The British had originally built the launch site as a test area, back in 1947. Up through the 60's and 70's, many groups had launched from the Woomera pads, but the British had cancelled out on their missile and space programs there. No new group had filled the gap with a sufficient volume of launches to keep the town alive. By the 90's the population had been below 1,000, and a third of those had been Americans, quietly manning a satellite tracking facility. Even then, the town had been dying. Before HyShot's failed launch in 2001, the last launch had been in 1995. In 2002, Woomera was a virtual ghost town, only sporadically visited by launch crews. Without a press release, almost no one would know or care that a rocket launch had occurred.

The test program had proceeded without a hitch despite the onsite prep time having been cut to the bone. The booster had been assembled, the support connections for remote telemetry and data acquisition made, and the prototype checked out. The booster with the X43-A attached had been mounted on the launch rail. Now all the preflight preparations had been completed. This morning the equipment appeared to be functioning perfectly. The telemetry feeds had begun supplying their information. The technicians had gone through the checklist a third time, and finally all systems were approved as good for the launch. In the trailer, Kori and Dr. Paull watched the monitor as the floodlights winked off and the morning sun lit Woomera in gold. Kori gave Dr. Paull a nod.

"Initiate the ignition sequence, mate," Dr. Paull told the nearest technician.

The man unscrewed a safety cap covering a red button and pressed it. Immediately a series of readouts came to life. Numbers shifted and lights flashed. A digital counter clicked off the seconds of a countdown in red. Everyone waited in silence, their eyes on their consoles. Compared to the televised shuttle launches, it seemed understated. There was no control room banter, no commentator, and the image of the rocket arose from a single camera. The solid fuel booster produced no trails of vapor, there was no gantry, and there were no crowds. The rocket simply sat, silent and still, until a sequence was completed and it ignited with a roaring hiss. The numerals on the counter began clicking off ascending seconds in green, counting the mission's elapsed time.

The monitor showed only an expanding cloud of smoke, billowing in all directions from the launch pad. The roiling beige mixture of rocket exhaust and ground dust completely obscured everything in front of the camera. Then as the camera began to tilt up, a bright vertical line became visible, though its shape was still indistinct. Xena took a few strides and pushed open the trailer's door. A shrieking roar met her ears, but it had already begun to diminish. She stood in the doorway at the top of a short set of stairs, looking towards the plume of smoke. A white exhaust trail from the combustion of the powdered aluminum and ammonium dichromate fuel was blasting down towards the ground, glowing incandescent within. Atop that pillar of fire rode the rocket, already accelerating hard, two hundred feet above the ground. As she watched, it continued to gain velocity, contesting against gravity as it burned its way into the sky. It moved far quicker than the larger launch vehicles she'd seen on TV and in a handful of seconds it was gone. Xena turned away and reentered the trailer, closing the door behind her on the suddenly silenced rocket's scream.

Now the research team was completely focused on their instruments. Their eyes flicked from one glowing readout to the next, while they practically held their breaths in nervous anticipation. The previous October, their own test rocket had gone off course during a booster malfunction, causing a disheartening failure.

"We have positive separation," a technician said.

"We're at Mach 3.4...3.5...3.6," a second technician reported.

"First stage burn lasted six seconds," Dr. Allan Paull softly confirmed to Kori, "and then the booster detached. There's a sixteen-second pause between burns while the jettisoned booster is still falling away. We lose a little speed here, but we need the time to make corrections and assure flight stability."

"Mach 3.5...3.4...3.3..."

"Trajectory stable," the first technician reported, "condition satisfactory for second stage burn."

"Four, three, two, one...and we have ignition of the Orion booster."

"Second stage burn has commenced," Dr. Paull affirmed with a glance at his screen.

"We're at 40km altitude, Mach 3.7."

Now the crew waited with even greater anxiety. Ten seconds passed, then twenty, as the Orion booster burned.

"We're at 49km altitude, Mach 5.3."

"Thirty seconds...eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one...and Orion burnout."

"We're at 58km altitude, Mach 7.7."

"Jettisoning Orion booster."

"We have confirmed payload detachment at 47 seconds."

"And now the prototype will continue to coast upward for another three and three-quarters minutes. We'll restabilize the trajectory after the second stage burn, while the payload reaches apogee at about 315km altitude," Dr. Paull commented.

"Telemetry on all channels is nominal."

"Beginning course stabilization at 81km altitude...adjusting pitch, 0.13 degrees, on my mark...three, two, one, mark."

While the technicians and Dr. Paull corrected the slight fluttering of the payload, Kori Polemos let a part of her mind wander. The prototype that was currently arcing up through the rapidly thinning atmosphere was not a completely accurate miniature of the X43-A. Her consulting engineers had authored a slight change in the exhaust nozzle that would cause a miniscule deviation in the scramjet's output. According to the flight plan, the experimental engine would slam into the ground after seven seconds of flight, striking the desert floor at over Mach 8. The hint of a grin curled her lips. She was out to prove more than the engine's ability to function in practice. One hundred and twenty miles off the coast of S. Australia, the Miss Artiphys lay in wait at station keeping, its heading, 172 degrees south from Woomera. Further away, at Mitsubishi in Yokohama, Japan, massive construction and other preparations had begun. A technician's voice pulled her back to the present.

"We have zero velocity...apogee at 313.75km. Shedding payload shroud."

Seconds passed as the crew held their breath. Far above the desert, the prototype was heeling over, its upward inertia spent. Slowly at first, it turned nose down, falling into the planetary gravity well and beginning its plunge back to earth.

"We have negative pitch," a technician announced breathlessly, "the payload has gone ballistic."

"The payload has started its descent, Kori," Dr. Paull said softly. "In about five minutes we'll know if your engine flies."

Seconds passed, measured by heartbeats and an atomic clock's readout. Somewhere far above them the scramjet's maw awaited its first breath of air. When the falling engine's speed was sufficient and the oxygen content high enough, an injector would release liquid hydrogen fuel, and the air, superheated by friction, would ignite it. When the resulting thrust increased the X43-A's speed, the crew would know that they'd succeeded.

"Negative pitch at 7 degrees, payload accelerating...and...we just went supersonic."

"Mach 1.2 at 266km altitude, pitch at minus 37 degrees."

The technicians continued to report their readings as the seconds passed. Despite their hyperawareness of the passing time, the trailer was submersed in a dissociating sensation of timelessness. Every thought was focused on the 300lb, alloy projectile, passing through the thickening atmosphere in servitude to gravity's laws governing the rate of a falling object. Galileo had proved that rate theoretically constant, regardless of mass, 500 years before. For each second the payload continued to fall, it would accelerate by a hair over 32 feet per second. In practice the actual acceleration of the scramjet during its descent was not constant, for the thickening atmosphere also played a part. Eventually it would actually slow the payload's speed and convert its energy into heat due to atmospheric friction.

"Maximum speed of Mach 7.9 at 81km altitude...no further acceleration."

"Velocity decreasing, external temperature rising."

"Mission elapsed time nine minutes thirty seconds."

"Mach 7.6 at 36km altitude," the technician reported at just shy of ten minutes.

"Inject the fuel," Xena ordered.

"Fuel valves open, hydrogen injector operational." The team members held their breath.

"We have positive acceleration! Mach 7.8...7.9...8.0."

"Congratulations, Kori! You have a working engine!" Dr. Paull and the technicians were jubilant as they tracked the data streaming into their flight recorders.

"Mach 8.2 at 18km altitude...wait...we have a course deviation!"

"I see it too! Pitch is increasing to negative 75 degrees, negative 68 degrees, negative 50 degrees...we are off course! Pitch deviation is increasing arithmetically! Now at negative 26 degrees at 6 km altitude, course is 172 degrees south!"

The slight deviation of the scramjet's outflow that the engineers had included in the prototype's design had caused it to bring its nose up and fly on a horizontal course.

"We have Mach 8.6 and accelerating! Pitch is level, repeat level, at 0 degrees." A pause and then, "Fuel is expended...speed decreasing...Mach 8.5...8.4."

Then from a great distance they heard the sonic booms...not the single boom of a jet fighter or the Concord passing overhead, but a rapid-fire series of booms that propagated by reflection and rolled like thunder across the empty Australian desert. It was the sound signature of a radiating body heated to 2,100 degrees F and traveling at over 6,200 mph. It was a sound never before heard by human ears.

"We lost telemetry during the booms, but it must be past the coastline already..."

"Run a projection of the course trajectory, mate!" Dr. Paull shouted ecstatically as he leapt to his feet. "Kori, your engine flew!"

But Xena was already gone.

_**July 7, 2002 - An Undisclosed Location in Washington, D.C.**_

**Washington, D.C. - **Leaders of both houses of Congress have called on President Bush to dispense with the last round of negotiations with the regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In response to the documented use of nerve gas against Kurdish separatists north of Kirkirk yesterday, the Senate has voted to apply the Hayes Clause, which was passed last April. A similar vote in the House is expected this evening. The clause allows the United States to respond in kind to Iraqi uses of weapons of mass destruction. President Bush has been in a closed meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff for most of the morning. His options include the launch of Tomahawk cruise missiles from surface ships and submarines in the Persian Gulf, armed with a variety of nerve gasses and airborne toxins currently deployed from the United States' ABC arsenal. Though there have been no press releases from the White House, the State Department announced that it has recalled its special envoy from the United Nations in New York, and has refused to meet with the Syrian ambassador, Abdullah Al-Haziz, who has been regarded as a go-between during this crisis. World leaders have remained silent for the most part, unwilling to align themselves with the Iraqi dictator.

**Los Angeles, Ca. **- This has been the third day of rioting in the South-Central section of the city, following the telecast last Thursday of the July 4th beating death of Jerome Lexington, at the hands of LA police officers. Mr. Lexington was suspected of being in violation of the recently passed McKenzie Gun Control Act. The death of Mr. Lexington was videotaped by a bystander and broadcast on Fox News at 8pm. Within an hour, mobs had taken to the streets and the LA police deployed riot squads to restore order. In the subsequent violence, illegal firearms have claimed the lives of seven officers, while estimates of civilian casualties are in the dozens. Over the weekend, the situation turned ugly when survivalists from the state's north coast and interior towns drove into the city with large numbers of weapons. Running gun battles have stopped all activity in many areas, and reports of the rocket propelled grenade assault on the South-Central precinct station house have been confirmed. The governor has declined the mayor's request to deploy National Guard troops in the city, instead using them to safeguard the state capitol of Sacramento. A state of emergency has been declared for Los Angeles County and citizens are warned to remain indoors.

**New York City **- A spokeswoman for the Mayor's Office announced today that the controversial plan to relocate the homeless would go forward. The Bureau of Social Services has been ordered to provide records of all persons who have been housed in public housing or shelters during the last two years. These persons will then be questioned and their status evaluated. Those found to be without permanent addresses and/or living in publicly funded housing will be removed to a "residence camp" on Grenadier Island in upstate Jefferson County. The island is about a mile off the Lake Ontario shore and about 7 miles from the towns of Cape Vincent and Three Mile Bay on Rt. 12, in a prime vacation area about 250 miles northwest of the city. The guarded community will feature barracks style living accommodations and communal mess and lavatory facilities. A contract for administration of the community has been awarded to Boaz Schlitz, Inc., the holders of the contracts for administration of the penitentiaries in Elmira, Auburn, and Ossining (Sing Sing).

The chief of Omega Sector folded the newspaper and laid it on the conference table. The reports chilled Spencer Trilby's blood, and such stories had become the rule, not the exception. It seemed that each day brought a new conflict or the escalation of an old one. He had come of age during the Second World War and had watched as the post-war world divided itself into armed camps that dug in for the Cold War. Back then he'd helped fight the threat of communism both at home and abroad, in declared conflicts and in the twilight world of espionage. Decades ago he'd learned to read between the lines of current events. Nowadays what he saw filled him with foreboding. What Xena had told Omega Sector allowed him to see with a vision akin to that of a paranoid schizophrenic. In myriad details he sensed the overarching hand of the goddess that Xena fought. Everywhere there was the veiled drive toward concentrating the means of coercion, centralizing authority, and advancing scientific applications for warfare. There was a condescending attitude displayed by those in power, and a disregard for individual liberties and human rights, that was more blatant now than at any time he could remember.

He thought back across the decades to the MIS. The Military Intelligence Service had been almost naive compared to today's agencies, back when he'd first worked there as an intelligence agent. A major part of their work had been the decryption and interpretation of messages and documents in foreign languages. They'd had so little to work with, and yet they'd solved the challenges of their times. Now he could count on the fingers of one hand the survivors who could remember the old shop, before it had become the CIA.

In all that time he had never come across an affair so deeply rooted, so pervasive, or so threatening. He had never tried to match wits and assets with an immortal, and he had never prepared to wage war against his own country. All his working life he'd fought to safeguard the American way.... No, he thought, I'm too old and there's too little time left to lie to myself anymore. Honestly then, he'd sought to safeguard the empowered elite by protecting their political and military interests. The idea of fighting for America as a whole had been an empty slogan, for average Americans only benefited because what benefited their leaders trickled down through society's strata. Now, for the first time in his life, he was enlisted in a struggle that would benefit not only the American elite, but Americans in general and the human race as a whole. Altruism? If he was finally doing the right thing for the right reasons, then why didn't it make him feel better?

Perhaps it was his ally. The cloned warrior, Xena, was as dangerous a potential dictator as anyone he'd ever imagined. Perhaps it was because his agency was cloning an army for her with which she could dominate the post-war world. Perhaps it was because his scientists were being forced to work with a dangerous madman. Perhaps it was because he had only the vaguest information regarding Xena's plans.

For Spencer Trilby, being on the outside of the planning was uncomfortable and unfamiliar territory. His gut instinct was to be very suspicious. Long ago he'd learned that being on the outside meant that you were expendable. Maybe that was why he'd been so adamant about phase two.

Buried far beneath one of the oldest habitations of mankind, a duplicate facility of the unmanned mirror site that was cloning "The Xenas" was at capacity, creating Trilby's only hope of moderating the warrior's potential ambitions. It was the deepest and most desperate secret he'd ever known, and he'd seriously considered using hypnosis to remove that memory from everyone who had been involved. Instead, he'd approved the hypnosis for everyone except himself and Harry Tasker. Now, of the six billion odd souls on the planet Earth, only two knew of the second phase.

Trilby had guessed what Xena would do when she found out. She'd definitely kill us, he thought, but since he'd come to the conclusion that they would be killed sometime before the war started, he didn't think he was risking much additional danger. When his time came, he'd have at least one consolation...the knowledge that one last time he'd tricked his master and left a time bomb ticking. When that bomb went off, he'd be beyond Xena's wrath, and she'd be left with a decision to make, knowing he'd engineered it. She would know that in the end, he'd foreseen something she hadn't, and had had the ability to bring it to fruition despite her abilities. It would be a Phyrric victory at best, but it was a victory nonetheless. He'd lived long enough to know that sometimes you just had to take what you could get and reap your rewards where you found them.

_**September 11, 2002 - Gangplank Marina, SW Washington, D.C.**_

**Washington, D.C.** - In an early morning press conference, the White House announced that at 9:00am Baghdad time, cruise missiles, Naval artillery, and tactical airstrikes began over four major cities in Iraq. The targets, Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, and Kirkuk, were pounded by a first wave of over 300 TLAM weapons, (Tomahawk cruise missiles). At the same time, air attacks launched from the carriers USS George Washington, USS Harry Truman, and USS Theodore Roosevelt, and airbases in Turkey and Qatar, destroyed radar installations, power plants, military bases, communications centers, and leadership bunkers. An unconfirmed report from CNN correspondent James Arden claimed that a lone F-117A stealth aircraft was seen over the Baghdad airport shortly before the facility was destroyed by what he termed, "a suspected limited nuclear strike". At the press conference, a spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff confirmed that munitions from the United States ABC arsenal had been used, but declined to specify what those ordinances were. Strategic weapons expert Mark Davis conjectures that the weapon could have been a Mark-28 thermonuclear bomb in B28RI, or B28FI configurations, or maybe even an antique Mark-5.

**The White House **- In a televised address from the Oval Office, President Bush announced that unilateral military action against Afghanistan had begun concurrent with the opening strikes against Iraq. While he wouldn't specify what those actions were, he said that they had targeted confirmed bases of the Al-Qa'idah terrorist organization that was responsible for the attacks a year ago today against the World Trade Center. Reports from observers in Pakistan have claimed that ground-shaking walls of fire were seen over mountainous areas in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Tactical analysts have conjectured that this area was struck by B-1 and B-2 bombers, which were noticeably absent from action in Iraq. If that were indeed the case, then the Pakistani reports would gain credence. The bombers are capable of launching both the JASSM (Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missile, or "cruise missile"), and laser guided ordinance, both including those with nuclear warheads.

**Los Angeles, Ca. **- Federal disaster relief payments have begun on claims from residents in the Beverly Hills, Marina Del Rey, Culver City, and Santa Monica areas. Additionally, benefits have been earmarked for the merchants and businesses of Hollywood; primarily those involved with film production. Damage assessments have been indefinitely postponed in the city, south of US 10, where a month of riots last July has left neighborhoods burned and gutted. An estimated 2 million people are living in makeshift tent cities and relief centers run by private charities.

**New York City **- Continuing federal investigations have been bogged down due to their inability to obtain documents from the Boaz Schlitz company regarding the derailment and catastrophic crash that caused the deaths of over 450 homeless persons being transported to the hastily built residence camp on Grenadier Island, in upstate Jefferson County. Rail inspectors reported that the train, which was composed of five converted livestock transport cars, an engine, and an employee personnel car, had been dangerously overcrowded. The five cars carrying the homeless had been padlocked from the outside, though this was termed, "a standard safety procedure". Inspectors refused to open the cars, fearing infection by the AIDS virus, known to be common in the homeless population. Instead, they cremated the deceased _en mass _and _in situ._ The controversial plan to remove the homeless from New York City was given the go ahead last July, and has drawn nationwide attention. 7,000 persons have already been removed from the city and another 4,500 are awaiting transport. The mayors of Baltimore, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Patterson are considering similar measures in their cities. President Bush has made several off-the-record remarks suggesting that he may be considering a national program for the concentration of destitute persons in "employment camps". Federal officials have been slated to tour American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and Liberia on fact-finding missions for the Dept. of HEW.

**Khartoum, The Sudan** - A spokeswoman for the International Red Cross gave a statement yesterday explaining the deaths of over 12,000 predominantly Muslim people in the northern lands bordering the Nile River. "We are in the opening week of a small pox epidemic," Avangelina Istamente claimed, "and the death toll will certainly rise. How many victims will eventually succumb is impossible to predict, since there is no longer a vaccine or treatment." Dr. G'rumbadaba L'membe of Doctors Without Borders confirmed Ms. Istamente's statement with an official diagnosis, saying, "this is the horror being so long awaited. We are seeing the reemergence of a disease that had been eradicated throughout the great wide world decades ago now. I am having nothing with which to treat the many dying persons here because this strain it is very, very bad. It is so sad." Both the variola major and variola minor forms of small pox were believed to have been erased from the roster of human pathogens in 1977. At that time, the only remaining live virus samples were in research labs in Moscow and in Atlanta, at the CDC, where they were being preserved for gene mapping. Currently, the only known live smallpox virus is a frozen sample at the USAMRIID facility in Ft. Detrick, Md. The first deaths were reported outside Khartoum, just one day after a corporate jet belonging to Kress Pharmaceuticals of Baltimore Md. crashed nearby.

**Seoul, Korea **- Reports have been received here that North Korean broadcasts from Pyongyang were overheard today, claiming that an unknown epidemic has struck the northern capitol. Facts are sketchy due to the communist regime's suppression of the details, however it is clear that fatalities are in the hundreds of thousands. The already impoverished country is in no position to halt an emerging epidemiological challenge. The broadcasts also noted the crash of an unidentified aircraft, but no further details about the incident are known.

"So, it begins," Kori Polemos whispered to the darkening bridge where she sat alone aboard the Miss Artiphys. She folded the Washington Post and tossed it on the bench next to her. "Athena's openin' her campaign with a purge of her enemies, domestic and foreign. It's time for me to make a move, and none too soon. There's so little time."

Outside, another evening was mantling the Capitol City with dusk. Late summer heat and humidity had replaced the cherry blossoms of spring, yet still the lights winked on. The monuments stood bathed in Lucifer's gift, but no evening star lit the heavens tonight. Perhaps in the morning, she thought, when Phosphor waits to greet Eos.

She'd been busy the past month, taking what had amounted to a crash course in how things worked on the most miniature of scales. Over the past three and a half months, furious construction had been underway as a lab had been refitted at Mitsubishi. Now it was ready, but a lab without a scientist was just a useless shell.

"I guess it's time for me to go," Xena whispered, rising to her feet, "Kori has another meeting tomorrow."

_**September 12, 2002 - Los Altos, Ca.**_

The place she'd traveled across the country to reach was an unassuming 60's tract house, two stories high, white with sky blue trim, sitting on a smallish lot. Rather unpretentious, she thought, for the home of such an important man. She walked right up to the door and pressed a button for the buzzer. Inside, an ordinary ding-dong chime announced her presence. Her hyper-acute hearing noted the footfalls of a person on the second floor moving to answer.

Xena had taken an overnight flight from Reagan International Airport in Washington, to the San Jose International Airport. After her arrival in California, she'd rented a Lincoln Towncar because it suited her purpose and she'd liked the name. She'd been happy to find that it had an abundance of legroom. First she'd driven a mile east to claim her reservation at the San Jose Lodge. It was a basic Best Western chain establishment on N 1st St, and it featured internet connections. She'd plugged in a special laptop and began a long IM briefing with Harry Tasker and a group of consultants from Omega Sector. After that, she'd gone outside and walked up 1st St to the Denny's restaurant for a late lunch/early dinner. Throughout her travels, no one had recognized her by name or face. She thought with disdain of the corporate types she'd seen, worth a fraction of her net, who demanded fine hotels and limousines with drivers, while she reveled in her anonymity and personally controlling her vehicle. Now the Lincoln sat parked at the curb, shiny and black, and looking official, sitting in full view. It was early evening.

A light flicked on, illuminating the concrete pad where Xena stood waiting outside the front door. The Destroyer of Nations constructed a disarming expression when the peephole in the door went dark for a moment as the resident checked her out. She was dressed in a sleeveless white blouse and a navy blue skirt, with the matching jacket draped over her right shoulder. In her left hand she carried a small laptop. Xena could have been anything from a graduate student to a reporter. With a click of the lock, the door swung open.

Hestia's blood, Xena thought, he answers his own door. This will never do. If I were an assassin, it would be too easy a kill to charge for.

The man standing before her was of average height, with a slim build and dark hair combed back from a high forehead. His eyebrows were arched in question, his mouth a neutral line. Xena could practically feel the intensity of the intelligence radiating from his deep brown eyes. He wore khaki slacks, a white polo shirt, and dark loafers. Utterly unremarkable to the naked eye, the clone thought, a genius, invisible in plain sight. How many people, she wondered, passed this man on a daily basis and never suspected that he had changed their lives, or that his work was changing the world.

"Dr. Eric Drexler, my name is Kori Polemos." He started slightly at the introduction, seemingly understanding the translation of her name. She presented an ID case bearing a CIA badge and photo identification card, then stood still as he took it and examined it closely in the light. He looked at her again to match her face with the card's tiny picture and then handed it back with an uncertain expression.

"Sir, may we go inside and talk? I have some data I'd like you to look at," Xena said, making a slight gesture with the laptop, "and I seriously believe that I may need to offer you protection."

The scientist gave her another startled look and then hesitantly gestured her in while standing aside. After he'd closed and locked the door, they walked a few yards to the living room. Xena took a seat on a couch facing the entry and Dr. Drexler seated himself in a chair to her right. The clone realized that he'd positioned himself with neither his back to the door nor his body in line with any of the windows. She nodded to herself in approval. Between them stood an end table with a stalk-mounted high intensity lamp.

"May I ask what this is about?" Dr. Drexler asked. "It's not everyday I get a visit from the CIA, and I don't believe I've ever been in physical danger before."

"Sir," Xena began, recalling her coaching and the material that had been prepared for her, "as you know, your work in molecular nanotechnology has had great impact. Still, some facets of it have been rejected by the government. In particular, the breadth of its potential applications has not been explored by the National Nanotechnology Initiative. It is obvious that some of this outcome has been a result of the attacks on your work by Dr. Richard Smalley. I can reveal that there are other very influential forces that have had a hand in determining official policy. Some of these elements are highly unsavory and unscrupulous, and are believed to present a significant danger to you personally."

"I don't see why they would feel the need to endanger my welfare now," the scientist reasoned, "nothing's changed between me and Smalley or between me and the government. They've never considered me a threat. Why am I suddenly in danger?"

"Dr. Drexler, you're aware of the epidemics that have recently begun in the Sudan and in North Korea?" Xena asked. "The virus responsible in both cases is a recombinant small pox strain that was developed through nanoengineering at the USAMRIID facility. It can not only replicate and infect, but it will mutate in a predetermined manner intended to optimize its lethality over a precise period of time. Thereafter, it will become benign in time for an occupying force to move through the area in safety. It is thought that you would be one of the few persons capable of reverse engineering the virus in order to point a finger at the perpetrators and cause international condemnation of the administration. I can assure you that this virus is only one of many that have been created recently using nanotechnology's greater precision in assembling the required amino acid components." Xena sighed and prepared to drop her bombshell. "We believe that they may have created and produced a new dihelical coding system."

The look of horror on the doctor's face screamed his shock and condemnation for an act of heinous inhumanity. The US had denounced the use of biological weapons, while at the same time creating an arsenal of germs more deadly than any found in nature. The scale of the duplicity was stupefying. If what she suspected was true, then someone had engineered microbes from the ground up, making their own equivalent of DNA. It was something incredibly complex, and for that reason, it made sense to start with a virus...the simplest of living things. The achievement was awesome in its implications. Man had created life, yes, but worse, there would be no countermeasure, no vaccine, and no cure. It was as if he'd opened his eyes to find the Sword of Damocles, grown to the size of a world-killing meteor, poised overhead.

"What I need to do is assure that you are safe," the clone said, "because there may soon come a time when only your knowledge can lead to the creation of nanobots capable of fighting these viral weapons. How long would you need to prepare for an evacuation to a secure site?"

For silent minutes the theoretical researcher only sat and stared at the Destroyer of Nations. He seemed to be in a state of catatonia, unresponsive and dissociated from the present. Finally he blinked once and looked up to meet her eyes.

"If you require the kind of work you suggest, then I will need to copy data and secure certain existing research, and you will have to assemble a team of scientists. I'm a theoretician, not a practical researcher or engineer. I can do my work with a computer, but to translate it into concrete results, there will have to be an extensive dedicated facility with personnel and an operating budget...and it may take a of couple years."

"Do you know who you'd need?"

"I can name three individuals I work with at the Foresight Institute who would probably be perfect as co-creators. The rest we'd have to search out. As for my own materials, well, I'd only need a day or two to round up everything necessary."

"Excellent. You've got twelve hours," she told the startled man. Without a pause, she continued, "Dr. Drexler, I'd like you to look at this."

She set her laptop between them on the end table, then opened it and folded the screen flat. Though the keyboard was upside down from her position now, she quickly typed in a DOS command to start a program. The laptop had looked like a standard Dell Inspiron, but the casing had been gutted and refitted by Omega Sector. Above the flat plane of the screen, a holographic projection sizzled into existance. A vector graphic rotated in space, describing a secured complex with massive computational facilities. Attached to it were practical laboratories, fully equipped to work with hazardous biologicals and the chemistry of limited molecular nanotechnology. Funding appeared to have been no object. The doctor's eyes lit as he absorbed each detail.

"This is beyond anything I've ever seen...this actually exists?" There was no disguising the awe in his voice. When Xena nodded yes, he asked, "Where?"

"In a restricted access facility within Mitsubishi's Advanced Technology Research Center, in Yokohama-Kanazawa, Japan," Xena answered. "It is guarded electronically and exceeds the CDC and USAMRIID Level 4 containment in the biolabs. For any hardware fabrication, we have access to Mitsubishi's electronics, metallurgy, and machining facilities. The lab's computational capabilities include a fully dedicated supercomputer with architecture similar to the Cray XD-1 series. It was created for this one purpose...to do nothing less than save the world."

"How? How was it funded...by whom?"

"I am not at liberty to say," the clone told him. How could she claim to have funded it herself, that she currently owned 22% of a company that did business in over 100 nations, or that her financial officers had mushroomed the $723 million Pappas fortune to $1.9 billion on paper in only nine months? The estate had been growing exponentially and she had no idea what it was worth at the moment. Xena's fingers skipped over another sequence of keys on the laptop and the hologram disappeared. It was replaced by a slideshow on the screen. Image after image of the completed lab flashed past. "You and your team will be there by this time tomorrow," she told him with a genuine smile. She found that conning a genius into helping her destroy the world made for a satisfying day's work.

_**November 8, 2002 - Columbia, South Carolina**_

Halloween had come and gone. This year the Pappas house had hosted only a quiet get together. Alex and Karen Williams, Harry and Helen Tasker, and Ray Fell had joined Danielle Lefferts, for an evening of dismal camaraderie, uncomfortable conversation, and morose reminiscing. In the house where Melinda and Serena Pappas and Janice and Gabriella Covington had lived, memory's ghosts walked in the Samhain night.

They'd sat in the parlor and listened as Ray had recalled his years studying with the elder couple, then progressed to their more recent stories of Serena and Gabriella. Most of them had secrets they didn't tell the others. All of them had suspicions they didn't voice. None of them saw the figure, dressed in black and silent as a thought, which looked in on them through the parlor's gauzy curtains as they drank their punch. None of them heard a window in the study rise or her movements as she located and removed an old file. None of them saw her walk back through the yard to a deserted clearing.

Perhaps the Destroyer of Nations remembered the traditional beliefs of the holiday and sought the ghost of her soulmate. Perhaps she also hoped to meet the shade of her lost daughter. What solace could either have given to a woman who had chosen a path of war and whose soul was cold and empty? What she saw or heard or felt in the darkness as the wind whispered through the chill fall night, no one but she herself can tell. Did the daughter of war long for her lost humanity? For love and her soulmate? For the life of peace that had always eluded her in a time so long past that it was only remembered as myth? Or was she sitting her watch in memoriam for the dead; a silent requiem in place of the song she hadn't been able to bring herself to sing a year before? Did she remember that a year before she'd still had a heart? She sat in the woods near the site of the pyres, under the same tree where Gabrielle had napped, still as a statue while the stars slipped by and the hours fled. When the morning star rose to greet the coming of dawn she rose and left. Only the fact that she had come at all gave some hope. And a week later....

"I don't understand," Xena whispered to herself as she stood alone in the deserted and boarded up space that had been the Columbia School of Martial Science. She could smell a year's dust, the trace scents of sweat, floor wax, and beneath it all, the barest hint of long dried blood. "A year ago I was so sure." In the darkness her unhesitating footsteps led her to the weapons rack where she ran her hand across the _gorytos_.

"Why am I here? There are things I need to be doin', but I sat at the pyre on Hallows Eve and I'm here tonight." She stared around the space, absorbing every detail with both her senses and her memory. Scenes of that last violent night flickered in counterpoint to the stillness around her, the past and present intercut together in jerky flashes like a film student's editing. "Why am I here, Gabrielle? A year ago today you fell in battle and I changed. I'm not who I was then...and not who you knew. You probably wouldn't even recognize me now. I remember that I didn't want you to leave me then, but I can't feel the need anymore. Maybe you were wrong about me for all those years. You were right about one thing though. There's still a battle to fight...one more battle to fight. An' maybe after that there'll be no more fightin', 'cause there won't be anything left to fight over." Her mood was slipping downhill from somber to fatalistic. "I wish you could tell me what's waitin' for clones on the other side, but I don't guess I'll end up in the same place as you this time anyway."

With a soft sigh, the Destroyer of Nations lifted the bow case and shouldered it. A few moments later she silently slipped out the back, relocking the firedoor behind her.

_**December 20, 2003 - Gangplank Marina, SW Washington, D.C.**_

**Washington, D.C. **- The White House announced today that it is pulling US troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq and ending its occupation of those countries. Inspectors report that all weapons stockpiles have been destroyed and the radioactive areas cordoned off. The peacekeeping forces, who were deployed following the six-day air war fifteen months ago, have just finished supervising those countries' first free elections. The new Democratic Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and the Democratic Confederation of Iraq will be opening their new government functions with the swearing in ceremonies of their presidents elect and parliamentary representatives. Both countries have petitioned for membership in the Islamic Union, the international trade federation that is modeled on the European Union.

**New York City **- The United Nations High Commissioner for World Health, and the Chairman of the World Health Organization have presented their findings regarding the epidemics in the Sudan and North Korea.**** According to their figures, over six and a half million lives were lost in the affected areas. The epidemics were caused by a mutant strain of _small pox variola major_, whose origins are unknown. The original disease was thought to have been eradicated in 1977, but it is now believed that a new viral form has emerged. Protests from the governments of North Korea and the Sudan were presented to both organizations, questioning how the same germ could emerge at the same time in two such distant places. Epidemiologists have been considering the question for over a year, and suspect the culprit to be an infected air traveler who carried the virus from one country to the other while still asymptomatic.

**Beijing **- Today the city is in the grips of an epidemic that began ten days ago and has since overwhelmed hospitals and clinics. The current death toll stands at over 257,000, with new cases being diagnosed daily. The rate of infection is accelerating, according to health officials, and no more treatment facilities are available. The government had quickly moved to quarantine the city a week ago, but fleeing government officials spread the disease to surrounding jurisdictions. The current at risk population is estimated at 17 million and growing. Government health officials announced that the epidemic is caused by a highly virulent strain of influenza, which is both highly contagious and highly lethal. The onset of symptoms follows exposure by only six to nine hours, rapidly progressing to debilitating fever, delirium, seizure, and coma. Death usually follows within thirty-six hours of infection. The disease is reported to be spreading rapidly, and calls to mind the influenza pandemic of 1918, that killed over 20 million worldwide in one year. The current epidemic began only a day after US trade officials met with their counterparts in Beijing to negotiate next year's most favored nation trading status and increased Chinese action against the pirating of US intellectual property and copyrighted material. Action on those agreements has been postponed.

"Sounds like a one-sided trade agreement to me," the Destroyer of Nations declared. A second manufactured plague had been unleashed, this time carried from Ft. Detrick in a briefcase rather than released from the wreckage of a plane. "So Athena's movin' against a major league enemy now. 'Bout time. Looks like she's destroyin' a major contender for power in her post-war world."

In her yacht's cabin Xena set the newspaper aside. She stood and donned a black leather duster. The clone's mood demanded motion, and so she found herself walking down the gangplank and onto the dock. Her boots struck a slow rhythm on its wet boards, producing a hollow, even sound akin to a funeral march. The USS Sequoia rested silent at its berth and the Odyssey was dark after returning from its moonlight charter cruise. Xena's steps led her out of the marina, across Water St. and Maine Ave., away from the closed seafood markets, and up SW 6th St. past Arena Stage and the Marina View Towers. She was accompanied by the wafting fishy scent of softly lapping water. A thin fog wove through the damp chill air that blew off the Potomac, keeping her company like a ghost. This neighborhood was deserted like much of the District late at night. A part of her mind kept tabs on her surroundings and she didn't fear anyone approaching her with stealth. She trusted her reflexes to answer any surprises, with a short sword and the Chakram of Day, drawn before a hand could be laid upon her. As Xena walked a random route she freed the rest of her mind to think. The news stories had told more between their lines than in them, and the cloned warrior had read carefully.

The Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare was preparing her battlefield, and that battlefield was the entire world. It would be a global conflict, a campaign to unite the whole earth under one leader, and bring all mortals under the power of one god. Neither had been done before, but never before had there been the potential for such a concentration of power. Science had conferred that opportunity, and Athena's cold-blooded strategy was applying its options through covert means. Already, three of America's enemies in the Muslim world had been neutralized, and the terrorist threat diminished, by depopulating the cadres of Islamists in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Sudan. All those fighters, trained by mujahideen left over from the CIA backed Afghan resistance against Russia who had turned their militant fury on the west, had been decimated. The moderate Arab states were probably breathing a sigh of relief, just like the leaders here and in Israel. In Asia, North Korea had long been an unpredictable threat, always lurking and destabilizing the Far East. Almost no one had been unhappy to see them suffer. Now, no one would ask too many questions or protest a suite of events whose end had justified their means.

There was one question Xena had increasingly asked herself. Where was Athena? Why hadn't she assaulted the Miss Artiphys or the Destroyer of Nations. She must have known why Xena had been at the Temple of the Chakrams. Why else would her clones have appeared that day and attacked? That incident had suggested two facts to the analytical mind of the _strategos_. First, that despite the possible advantage Xena stood to gain by possessing the Chakram of Day, the Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare hadn't attacked her with more overwhelming numbers of clones because she simply didn't have them. It hinted at the progress of the goddess' own cloning program. Living clones of Livia and Valesca had never been seen. Although she'd sent three each of Mavican, Callisto, and Elainis within about a week, she didn't have any more left on the day Xena had gone to the temple. And Xena had disabled every clone sent against her, depleting her enemy's forces. Second, perhaps the Goddess actually feared her now, much as a person might fear a black widow spider, knowing her to be potentially deadly but in no way accepting her as an equal. Surely she knew that the cloned Warrior Princess held the fourth chakram, and that it was a god killer. The most compelling reason why she hadn't assaulted the mortal clone personally was her fear of the weapon itself, and Xena's known prowess with it. It was slim insurance, but Xena had kept the chakram close ever since. In her time, many a mortal had died at a god's hands.

Xena's analysis had yielded other possibilities. Perhaps the goddess wasn't yet aware of whom she faced. Perhaps she still thought herself opposed by the Warrior Princess, not the Destroyer of Nations. Perhaps the goddess didn't understand Xena's aims or the depth of her hatred. If she expected only a personal vendetta over the deaths of Eve and Gabrielle, conducted with the Warrior Princess' morals and restraint, then she was expecting a faint echo of the mayhem the Destroyer of Nations was willing to unleash. No one had ever seen the Destroyer of Nations as she was now, fully dedicated to the God of War, possessed by the Spirit of Battle, and without any designs past her enemy's destruction. They had only seen her rampaging in a frenzy of _katalepsis_ a few times long ago. Had they ever even understood that she wasn't completely human? And finally, no mortal had ever truly threatened the existance of a god in battle. Deep down in her heart the goddess almost certainly felt safe, no matter how Xena's actions might hamper the execution of her plans. She'd assessed the mortal clone and dismissed her as being nothing more than an annoyance, short-lived and soon to be dead, just a vexing distraction for her own clones to deal with. Her divine pride would allow her to expect nothing more.

Xena allowed herself a grin. The Goddess of Wisdom had made a number of strategic errors. She didn't know her enemy. Athena didn't understand the roots of her motivation. She didn't discern her adversary's resources or patience or commitment. But worse, the goddess overestimated her own position. All of history supported her mistaken assessment of the balance of power in this conflict. Xena had only to bide her time, seemingly playing into the immortal's hands as the goddess consolidated her power. The longer Xena waited, the stronger Athena would be, and the more she'd be lulled into the belief in her own invincibility.

In three months Xena's cloned army would be half-grown, but the mad Dr. Kishihara had built in a surprise. In another year or so, Athena would stumble on and destroy the primary cloning site, terminating the humans who had have outlived their usefulness and destroying their potentially dangerous secrets. At the same time, the goddess would congratulate herself on nullifying Xena's bid for power, and the Destroyer would make sure she believed that. Then in July a year hence, the surviving clones' training would begin with the _chiliarchoi_. A year after that, the last war would be fought. The _strategos hypatos _already knew the targets and what weapons would destroy them. By the time she finished preparing the world as a battlefield, one out of two people would already be dead. The technological base of the industrialized nations would be set back five hundred years or more.

She knew how the last battle would be fought. It would be contested by a limited number of warriors who killed face to face, with courage and physical prowess, not from a distance with the advantages of science and technology. She would force Athena to fight on her terms, and those terms would favor the attributes over which Ares had always held sovereignty. After the fighting ended on the battlefield, the last act of war would begin when the goddess appeared to personally exact her revenge on the mortal who had dashed her hopes. When that time came, Xena would be ready to do what no mortal had done in all of history. She would kill a goddess.

A furtive sound from somewhere behind alerted Xena's conscious mind to a possible threat. She snapped from her reverie to full awareness in an instant, senses focusing on her surroundings, probing, sampling...receptive to a degree most mortals never know. She placed herself on C ST., just past SW 1st St., and a half-block before its intersection with Delaware Ave. Alongside her on the north stood the Rayburn and Longworth House Office Buildings, divided by South Capitol St.. The slightest scuff of a sole crossing Canal St. behind her informed on the position of a potential enemy. The footfall had been light, speaking of stealth defeated by a random stone, unnoticed while the person's attention centered on her figure 20 yards ahead. She didn't turn or acknowledge the person's error, but instead maintained her pace, passing the mouth of Delaware Ave. As she walked, the Destroyer of Nations tuned in more and more closely on her pursuer until she could feel every footfall. At the same time, her secondary awareness reported on an idling motor vehicle around the corner of New Jersey Ave. Its engine confessed to missed tune-ups with a roughness at idle that didn't come from a racing cam. Definitely not a police car. More likely some lurking compatriot of the person following behind.

Xena turned the corner onto South Capitol St., continued to let her shadow to pass out of the nearest street lamp's glow, and then she leaped into a double somersault. She landed in the margin between two cars and lowered her body out of sight below their fenders. And then she waited, silently, blending in with the shadows and making herself invisible.

Swift footsteps followed a moment later, striking loud in the silent air, and speaking of the panicked surprise of a tail who had lost their subject in plain sight. She could count their strides and place the person to within a foot as they pounded down the sidewalk, coming abreast and then passing the well of darkness where she crouched. They had just passed when she leaped back up, launching herself across the fender of the car in front of her, taking two swift strides over its roof, and leaping into the air. Xena drew her weapons while her body flipped through an aerial cartwheel. She hit the ground moving fast, marking her target who was just turning to face her.

The man was unfamiliar but that hardly mattered to the Destroyer of Nations. Thief, mugger, or perhaps something more, he would find himself just another unfortunate soul who had pitted his fate against the Hellenes' Bane. He had swept back one side of his long coat, desperately reaching for a pistol in the inside pocket. His hand had barely touched the cold metal when the black blade of the short sword forced its way between two of his ribs. It struck with the force of a hard punch, but instead of throwing him back it simply pierced his body. The distal foot of the weapon sliced through the layers of muscle, fascia, and organs, lacerating them as Xena wrenched the blade sideways before pulling it free. The man didn't even have time to react before the flash of the ancient chakram whipped across his throat to silence him. Xena had slashed him with a quickly sweeping forehand stroke. She continued to pivot, following through by rotating her body while spinning on the heel of her right foot, and completing the move with a high crescent kick that knocked him off his feet and into the shadowed pit between two parked cars. In just a few seconds they had traded places, Xena standing on the sidewalk, he crumpled out of sight between a pair of bumpers.

The man hadn't even taken his last sucking, lung-cut breath when the clone rounded the corner of South Capitol St., turning back onto SW C St. at a dead run. Her long strides ate up the distance. Up ahead, around the corner on New Jersey Ave., she could still hear the motor idling. As she approached the corner, she cut across the grass to the shadows beside the Longworth Office Building, slipping behind the decorative hedges that sheathed the foundation. In the dark, she barely registered the slumped body of a homeless man wrapped in a ratty blanket in time to leap over his sleeping figure and keep from tripping. She cleared him by inches and continued until she could see the whisping puffs of exhaust from the tailpipe of a dark blue Ford van parked a half-dozen spaces from the corner. The vehicle sat across the strip of lawn and the sidewalk, perhaps thirty feet from the office building's side. There were two men inside.

The clone came to a halt behind a bush opposite the van. Silently, she took careful aim, and then with a quick overhand flick, she whipped the chakram towards the target. The weapon flew with a soft simple whistle, unlike the warbling of the Combined Chakram. It struck the nearer window, crumbling the safety glass into a shower of tiny shards. The blade skipped off the nearer man's forehead, cutting deep and sending up a fountain of dark blood and brain matter that painted the inside of the windshield in front of him. It ticked against the rearview mirror with a ping and struck the driver at eye height before continuing out his open window as it curved gracefully up into the night air while crossing the street. Xena took two strides out of the brushes and waited. The chakram continued to rise, finally ricocheting off the second story of the Cannon Office Building on the far side of New Jersey Ave. and reversing its course. As it approached she raised her left hand and snatched it out of the air. Xena slipped back into the bushes, trotted back the way she'd come, and only broke from cover after a careful check of the surroundings revealed that SW C St. was still silent and deserted. The homeless man hadn't even twitched in the meantime, despite having been hurdled twice.

Xena never looked back. She didn't make any attempt to identify the dead. Every instinct she possessed told her that the man who'd followed her had meant her harm and that the two in the van had been accomplices. Her intuition recognized that all three had been plotting something that she'd stumbled into. She had no concrete proof of any of this, but as a warlord, she'd followed her instincts in the same fashion. If she had erred on the side of violence, at least it had kept her alive. What were a few more dead? It was her own life that was of paramount importance, and that alone justified the bloodletting. She not only struck before asking questions, but often she didn't bother to ask them afterwards either. What would have been the point?

Fifteen minutes of walking at a moderate pace brought her to the Gangplank Marina. Within twenty minutes she was back in her cabin aboard the Miss Artiphys, removing her duster. Her weapons lay on the newspaper she'd read earlier, awaiting cleaning. Before her the familiar blue flash of light announced the appearance of the God of War. Xena stopped to watch, and then moved to hang up her coat. When Ares was fully materialized, he offered her a wry smile.

"Can't stay out of trouble, I see," he stated, eyeing the blood on her blades. "Were you just out to do a good deed, or did you intend to piss off my sister?"

Xena looked him in the eyes with a lack of comprehension.

"Just out for a walk and ended up dustin' some strays off my coattails," she told him evenly, shaking her duster for emphasis, "so who were they and what did they have to do with your sister?" Xena slipped a hanger into the coat's sleeves and hung it in a closet.

"Oh, let's just say you've foiled her most recent plot," Ares told her as she turned to face him, her attention captured now by his words, "she'd indirectly made it possible for those three terrorists to obtain the materials to pollute half of the city. In the back of that van they had a very large explosive device and a larger barrel of 'hot' waste. It was a 'dirty bomb', and the blast would have sent up a cloud of radioactive dust across the District."

"So she's got mujahideen doin' her dirty work too now?"

"Sure, everyone gets to play in her game. The _Al-Garna'ah al-Islamiyyah_ of Egypt are returning to active military actions against the United States...this time in response to the US attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan. Their leader, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, is still rotting in prison here for his part in the first WTC bombing in 1993. Now they're trying to even a handful of scores, but the real point of Athena's strategy is to prod the US into opening a campaign against the rest of the Muslim world...Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, Pakistan, yadda, yadda, yadda. One more terrorist attack on American soil would probably do it right now with things the way they are, and the outcome is predictable, so another nest of enemies would be disposed of before the main battle begins."

"Makes sense," Xena conceded, "clearing the board before beginning serous operations."

"And tonight, you just happened to be in the right place at the right time."

"I had no idea who they were, but I don't like bein' followed or chased. Must've been fate."

"Maybe so." He eyed her speculatively for a moment before advising, "Be careful."

His gaze shifted to the Chakram of Day, regarding it with an unreadable expression, and then the blue light flared and he vanished. Xena moved to begin cleaning her blades.

**Continued in Chapter 5**

58


	5. Clonefic Part 3 Chapter 5

Clonefic

Part 3 Chapter 5

By Phantom Bard

**For Disclaimer**: See Part 3 Chapter 1

_**April 2, 2004 - An Undisclosed Location in Washington, D.C.**_

"Impossible!" Spencer Trilby exploded as he slammed his fist down on the conference table in a rare show of temper. Down the table, Albert Gibson shuddered at the reaction to his report. Even Harry Tasker looked at the tabletop for a moment before returning his attention to his boss's face. The Chief of Omega Sector was livid.

"We had no idea, sir," he apologized softly, "Dr. Kishihara never really tells anyone what he's doing, and no one asks. They stay as far away from him as they can...can't blame them either. He even gives me the creeps."

"But he must be answering to Xena!" The Chief asserted, "She knows what he's been up to...what he's done."

"She probably does, but she doesn't tell us much and we haven't seen her in almost a year." Harry sighed. "There's nothing to be done about it now, sir. The 'specials' just got up and walked away last night and there's no way to track them. My guess is that Xena has them. At least I hope she does."

"Sir, there was no way we could have known they'd be ready in just over half the time the regular clones are taking to mature," Gib added uncertainly, "Kishihara must have done something to their genes to accelerate their late stage development."

"Of course he's done things to their genes! That's all he's been doing from the start. That bastard's a psycho," Trilby grated, "he should have had an accident long ago."

"That's still possible, sir," Harry said coldly, "and maybe he will very soon. If the 'specials' are free, then I can't see Xena letting him live. He's of no use to her now."

The three men sat in silence digesting the cold-bloodedness that appraisal implied. The night before there had been an alarm in the primary cloning lab. The disappearance of the two special clones had only been discovered after the fact. By the time security had arrived in the lab, the pair had been long gone. Kishihara had been inebriated as he often was while off-duty and had barely been lucid. He'd known nothing, the other technicians had known nothing, and the security guards had found nothing. Because of the extremely dangerous nature of the subjects and the lack of information, nothing beyond a search of the premises had been undertaken.

The last time the clones had been seen, they'd been immersed in their tanks, stark naked, and at a stage of development equivalent to about seventeen years of age. The regular clones were at about thirteen years of age. Supposedly none of the clones were to awaken until they reached twenty-five years of age. Obviously Xena and Dr. Kishihara had other plans. The Omega Sector agents felt heavy with frustration. The incident had clearly demonstrated their lack of control.

_**April 2, 2004 - North of Ulaan Gom, Uvs, Mongolia**_

Xena had to admit that the situation was macabre. Here she sat in her tent, accompanied by a pair of clones who were identical to both each other and herself at a younger age. Even stranger was the fact that their last injection of growth accelerant was still interacting with the genetic adjustments Dr. Junichiro Kishihara had made. They'd aged by about four years since she'd met them after their escape from the lab yesterday. The effect had been progressing faster at first. It had slowed visibly over the past twelve hours. In another six hours they'd have ceased their quickened maturation and would age at the normal rate for Xena thereafter...for as long as they survived. The final result would be a pair of specially enhanced clones of about 25 years of age, completely indistinguishable from their _strategos hypatos_, their genotype pattern. Xena nodded to herself in approval. Dr. Kishihara had done excellent work. It was a pity that he was a sociopath and had to be disposed of. He was really no worse than many of the loyal soldiers in her old army, but unfortunately for him, this was not ancient Greece. After he was gone, his work would live on.

"In eight hours, you," she looked pointedly at the clone wearing in her own white dress shirt and black slacks, "will return to the lab, position this camera, secure Dr. Kishihara, and then leave with him in your custody. You will bring him here. I don't need to remind you that this must be done while being accepted as me." The clone nodded, agreeing without question. Her concept of self encompassed a middle ground, that included only her twin and the woman speaking to her, between the "I", (or her own internal monologue), and "they", which was everyone else she'd ever encountered.

"Once he is secured, we will leave here, and soon, you," she addressed the second clone, wearing a black battle dress uniform, "will go to the mirror site and act as its guardian. Once there, you will not contact anyone, nor will you be contacted until the _chiliarchoi _are mature. At that time, you will contact me. Until that time, you will kill anyone who enters the site. Understood?" The second clone nodded. The expectation of almost two years of solitary, dangerous, and unremittingly tedious duty made no visible impression. Like her twin, she had been bred to serve.

Xena checked their weapons. Each bore handguns, either Glock model 19 or 18. The first clone carried the expected spare 17-round magazine, below the reduced size model 19, in a shoulder holster. The second clone carried a satchel with two dozen 31-round magazines, six of which could be carried at a time suspended on thigh rigs from a utility belt. A duplicate Glock 18 completed the guardian's twinned belt holster rig. All three weapons had been altered to a trigger pull of 3-lbs. and 3/8" travel. On the guardian's paired handguns, two of the three standard safeties had been removed.

_(The Glock model 19 is a compact version of the full sized Glock model 17, and is intended for concealed carry. It is a semi-automatic handgun with a 4" barrel, and uses 9x19mm ammunition. The Glock model 18 is a full size, select fire autopistol in 9mm bore, which can fire in either semi-automatic or fully automatic modes. It can use 9mm Glock magazines of up to 33 round capacity. Without the magazine, it weighs 22 ounces. The weapons feature a non-metallic frame, and come with three trigger-actuated safety systems. The normal trigger pull for both pistols is 5.5-lbs with ½" travel.) Editor _

Not a moment had been wasted since the Destroyer of Nations had met the two. Dr. Kishihara had already performed their preliminary downloads, giving them enough capabilities to escape. Because of their enhancements, the downloading of information to trigger their full memories had been done with a 6X DVD player in Xena's tent. It had taken another four hours instead of several sessions over a couple of days. Then their practical training had begun with an introduction to firearms.

After demonstrating with the autopistols, Xena had tested the clones. She recalled the instruction program that she and Gabrielle had once taught at the FBI's compound in Quantico. By comparison to the HRT operatives, her "specials" needed only a single lesson and a short round of practice before they could outperform her. Each had watched with serious concentration as she'd disassembled and reassembled the Glocks as a timer ticked away the seconds. She'd loaded magazines, shown how to clean the firearms, and finally demonstrated drawing and firing the weapons.

Both clones were identical in their levels of performance. They moved with inhuman speed and precision. It took them only forty-eight seconds to break down and reassemble an autopistols, and only twelve seconds to load seventeen rounds into a magazine. Then they'd stood on the firing line, drawn, acquired, and fired, placing all seventeen rounds through a single hole in their targets within eight seconds.

She had demonstrated with the sword for her own satisfaction, testing their memories of what she herself had remembered from another lifetime. The "specials" had stood facing her on the empty desert floor, each bearing a broadsword patterned after her own. All three of the Xena's had identical blades forged of HyCore steel by Mitsubishi, carried in identical scabbards worn on their backs.

"At my attack, you will act to neutralize my threat without causin' injury," she had instructed. The clones had nodded in understanding.

The Destroyer of Nations had known intellectually that the clone could react and defend faster than she could attack, and yet she'd expected to come close on at least the first try. Xena was prepared to pull her blow when she faced off against the first clone. The God of War's Favorite intended to begin her attack at full speed. She wanted to impress on them the absolute necessity of acting without hesitation and controlling their actions with complete focus and precision.

In a blur she had reached over her right shoulder, her fingers unerringly grasping the broadsword's hilt, and drawing it in a movement that would blend into an overhead blow. It was the fastest and most direct attack she could use. As her blade cleared the scabbard she sensed her opponent's stance shift. As her blade cleared her head she registered a flash of reflections in the air. Xena couldn't have redirected her movement if she'd tried; she was already moving at her own neural threshold.

The impact caught her sword midblade, just before she had straightened and locked her wrist. Contact came precisely from the sweet spot, about two-thirds of the way down between the hilt and tip, on the "special's" blade. The steel rang and then shrieked with a sliding parry that redirected the force of Xena's swing and stripped the sword from her hand. And then there was another reflected shimmer on polished steel and a final shift in the "special's" stance. The Destroyer's blade flipped end over end a half-dozen yards through the air. The "special" had resheathed her weapon before it landed.

"Excellent," the Destroyer of Nations said, swallowing the visceral twinge of anger at being bested. No one had ever disarmed her when she'd used that move, though a handful of warriors had survived it. She shifted her attention to the waiting clone and said, "Next."

The blow to her ego, had she allowed herself to feel it, would have been even worse this time. The second clone had watched the first and planned her response. This time when Xena reached for her blade, the "special" stepped in and locked up her sword arm by grappling her elbow and wrist. She spun the Destroyer's body around, and then drew the sword using Xena's own hand, before twisting the blade from her grasp. All of her actions had been redirections of Xena's movements, and she'd never even bothered to draw her own weapon. When the Destroyer of Nations spun back to face the second clone, the "special" was already standing with her teacher's sword presented hilt outward, resting across a forearm. It was in that moment that Xena had decided the second clone would become the guardian.

Now the three sat together in the tent, sipping Coke and making plans. They were about thirty-five miles north-northwest of Ulaan Gom, the only city in the remote province of Uvs, in northwestern Mongolia. To the west rose a barren mountainous land under whose crags a secret lay hidden. To the east lay the great lake, the Uvs Nuur. They were much closer to the Russian border than to the Mongolian city, but the land was so deserted that even the most paranoid of realms seldom patrolled the frontier. Here, life had barely changed since the time of the original Xena. The Destroyer had come to fetch her "specials", and to settle with the cold-blooded Dr. Kishihara, for whom she still had plans. After that, she and her clones would drive to Ulaan Gom, take her private plane to Ulaan Baatar, and then to Tokyo. They would make a brief stop at Dr. Drexler's lab in Yokohama, and then return to Washington, D.C. None of them would ever see this place again. Already time was short, and Xena could almost feel Athena breathing down her neck.

Typical of a great general, Xena's intentions and actions were unanticipated by friend and foe alike. The only thing she would save from the primary cloning site was the one thing that Omega Sector assumed she had no use for. In her actions, they would see the result they expected, and those actions would confirm their mistaken impression of the primary site's value.

_**April 3, 2004 - An Undisclosed Location in Washington, D.C.**_

"I can't believe it!" Spencer Trilby thundered. He'd been doing more and more of that over the last few days. "They let her right walk right in and walk out with Kishihara!"

"Sir, there were no orders to stop her or Kishihara," Harry Tasker reminded his boss. "It's her program anyway and everyone there knows it. Kishihara's her albatross, and I don't think anyone was sorry to see him go. He's probably lying dead in the desert less than a mile away."

"And good riddance," Albert Gibson added.

"I'd like to confirm that," Trilby said.

"We had a tracer on him," Gib said, maintaining a dejected expression when Spencer looked at him hopefully. "Security found it a half-mile out from the front gate. My guess is that she scanned for it, found it and ditched it...and then ditched him."

"It was down in the forties overnight, sir," Tasker added, "and the body's cold by now. Thermal's no good and even an inch of soil would hide him from the best satellites. He could be anywhere, and if Xena doesn't want him found..." Harry paused and shrugged. "Well, sir, we don't have the manpower to search until we turn him up."

"So the 'specials' are gone, Kishihara's gone, and Xena's gone too," the Chief of Omega Sector recited morosely.

"We know a private plane took off from Ulaan Gom within an hour after Xena left the lab," Al said. "It was bound for Ulaan Baatar like everything else from there. No way to track it after it left Mongolian airspace though. She could be anywhere by now."

"Hasn't that always been the case?" Spencer Trilby asked rhetorically. No one answered.

"I'll admit that she's a wild card, sir," Harry told his boss, "but we know one place she'll be." He paused for a moment before continuing. "She's got to come back for her clones. Even though it's two years away, she'll be back in Mongolia in the spring of 2006."

_**January 6, 2005 - Refitting Slip C271-B, Yokohama-Kanazawa, Japan**_

**Washington, D.C. **- The White House announced today that the CIA has confirmed the below ground testing of a thermonuclear device in the remote province of Uvs, in northwest Mongolia near the border with Russia. The area is largely empty desert, forty miles northeast of the city of Ulaan Gom and about 680 miles from the capitol of Ulaan Baatar. The device was calculated to have had a yield of about 20 kilotons, roughly the power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The site has been closed to foreign inspectors, however some flights are known to have landed at the airport in Ulaan Gom this morning. Also this morning, reports of elevated radiation have come in from Khandagayty in Russia. This city is within twenty-five miles of the blast site. Mongolia is not a signer of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaties, having never been suspected of having nuclear capabilities. The country has no breeder reactors or enrichment facilities, and no known program or technology for creating such a weapon. Intelligence experts worldwide are baffled.

**Beijing **- In an official statement, the communist leadership has expressed dismay at the revelation of a nuclear power on their doorstep. China, still in the aftermath of last year's epidemic, which claimed over 27.5 million lives, called the test, "an unexpected and potentially disruptive factor in Far Eastern relations that will certainly alter the balance of power. We call upon the world's nuclear powers to provide counsel to the Mongolian leadership in formulating non-aggressive policies." Repercussions from the epidemic and the resulting socio-economic upheaval have left the government weakened and preoccupied with domestic concerns. Analysts believe that the Chinese are not capable of waging an effective regional war at this time, especially one involving weapons of mass destruction. There has been no official comment from the Mongolian government.

The real story's much more appalling, Xena thought to herself. She was sitting in the cabin aboard the Miss Artiphys, sipping a Classic Coke and reading the Washington Post, an English language version available in Japan. Ironic, she thought, since she'd just returned from Washington, D.C. two days before, after recovering an important body.

Her primary cloning site had been assaulted by over a three hundred cloned warriors, dressed in woven spider silk armor similar to what Elainis had worn. They had been armed with modern cartridgeless automatic weapons, based on the Heckler & Koch G11 rotating breech design. To take the facility, they had defeated the electronic defenses, uploaded a command to open the gate, and then overwhelmed the security personnel. The invaders had mercilessly executed every technician, guard, and scientist they'd found. Then they had placed their charge and withdrawn. Ninety minutes later the blast had been recorded.

Omega Sector had no idea how the primary facility's location had been compromised. They didn't know that Dr. Kishihara had survived, or what had been done to him in Tokyo before he had been released. They would never know that the hypnotic suggestions Xena had planted in Dr. Kishihara's subconscious had been expressed verbally as he slept. Later, while in Athena's service, the doctor had talked in his sleep, and over several months the accumulated mutterings had finally been assembled into a suspicion. Athena's minions had confirmed that suspicion, pinpointing the locality and giving them the position of a massive clandestine cloning facility.

When the disaster began, the agents at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of Omega Sector had received telemetry and communications at first. They'd known when the attack started and when their security was breached. They'd watched helplessly as system after system crashed.

Aboard her ship, Xena had received information by much less sophisticated means. The day Dr. Kishihara had been taken, the "special" had positioned a simple CCD camera and transmitter near the entrance. The device had fed a masked, 512-bit encoded video signal to a satellite, and from the satellite to her laptop. It was basically a solar powered camera phone, uplinking to a worldwide com network, but it showed her the enemy's troops, their numbers, equipment, and the breaching of the primary site. Because it was fully independent of the site, it had shown her their withdrawal long after Omega Sector's systems went blind. Xena had an .mpeg file of the entire attack.

For a second time, Xena didn't recognize her enemy. She had clear pictures of their faces and they were all the same, clones of an unknown male warrior. She'd made a print and called on her patron god.

"Ares, God of War, appear to your Favorite."

The blue light flared in the cabin, delivering Ares.

"Home movies, Xena?" He asked, watching a replay of the file on her laptop.

"As expected, Athena has destroyed the primary cloning facility," Xena reported. "No surprise there, though it took her a little longer to find it than I'd thought."

"The destruction of the site was never in doubt, but did the secondary tactics work?"

"See for yourself," she said, passing him the printed enlargement.

The picture showed a stern chiseled face with medium length, wavy black hair, a straight nose, and thin lips set in a line. A small telltale birthmark in the shape of a waning moon several days past full accented the slight hollowness of the man's right cheek. It was a handsome face marked by coldness and focus. In the background, the same face was repeated on every figure in the frame.

"Success," the God of War commented, letting the print fall to the desk. He smiled.

"Yes, Dr. Kishihara strikes again," Xena confirmed, looking at the picture and allowing herself a smile. She sighed and looked back up at her patron god. "Ares, who is he?"

"Ahhh, the million dollar question," the god said. "He's a contemporary of Elainis. In fact, he was her intended husband. He died at Ilios about 3,150 years ago. I think my sister has an affinity for the period," he mused.

"Ares," Xena growled, giving her voice an edge of impatience, "that could be a lot of warriors. I'd heard that about 9,500 died there in battle. Was he Achaean or Dardanian?"

"You're forgetting your history and that Athena's an elitist," Ares chided, teasing his Chosen with delay as he stretched out the suspense. "Only the finest for her army." Xena gave him a harder stare. Ares smiled. "Lighten up, Xena," he said, "it doesn't matter who he is, but I'll admit, the situation's poetic, all considered." He savored the irony. Xena sat, waiting him out. Finally he broke down and spilled the information. "Athena has cloned Achilles...dipped by his mother, Thetis, in the River Styx to gain invincibility, save for his heel from which she held him. Of course his heel became his deadly weakness. He was the greatest warrior the Greeks brought to Ilios. I'm sure you've heard the story. I'm also sure that Athena has made some genetic corrections. After all, she 'found' the infamous Dr. Kishihara in Tokyo and it would appear that she employed him. Achilles' heel may no longer be vulnerable, but he's got a bigger weakness now, every one of him."

"He's not the only one," a familiar voice said, addressing him from the salon. The god of War turned to face a second Xena, just entering the room. "You too can be fooled, and that's somethin' I needed to know."

Ares stared at her, uncomprehending. He looked back at the clone he'd been talking to and then back again at the newcomer, and raised an eyebrow in question.

"Ares, meet my enhanced clone, Prima."

The clone that Ares had been speaking with nodded and gave him a smile. Ares frowned in irritation and cast a dark glance on his Chosen.

"She's a special clone created by Dr. Kishihara," Xena explained as she came to his side, "before I sent him off to subvert Athena's efforts." Xena regarded Ares for a moment and then said, "Lighten up, Ares, I already knew she could fool mortals. Now I also know that she can pass for me, even in a god's eyes."

Ares regarded her with a sly smile, his mind working to fathom her intentions.

"About Kishihara..." Ares began, "the primary site's destruction dispensed with all the unneeded human collaborators, but the bad doctor still knows about your project."

"Actually Ares, Kishihara's been neutralized too. He died on New Years' Day of a massive pulmonary embolism. Among other things, I'd forcibly injected him with Drexler's nanobots after we took him out of the primary site. Drexler created them as a cure for arteriosclerosis. Kishihara thought it was a toxin. In return for his continued cooperation, I promised him an antidote...that doesn't exist. In the meantime, the little bugs were converting his lipid plaques into caustics, with the help of the chemicals in the 'antidote' he was injectin' every week. They were happily eating away at the walls of his aorta. Drexler programmed them for eight months."

"You're sure of this?"

"We recovered the body, Ares," Xena assured him, "some of the nanobots were made to create a chemical homing beacon. They began manufacturing a scent marker when his body temperature dropped to 80 degrees. Humans can't smell it, but industrial trace gases indicators and trained dogs can. He'd already reported that he was workin' in the Capitol City, but he wasn't sure where. We knew Athena's headquarters is in Washington someplace. Not really a big surprise, since the government's there, but now we've got a pretty good idea of which building it's in."

"And when will you neutralize her facilities?"

"During the preparation of the battlefield," Xena told him with a cold smile, "after I dispose of my remaining human collaborators at Omega Sector."

The God of War gave his Favorite a smile of approval and vanished in a flash of blue.

Kori Polemos moved to gaze out of her ship. The view through the cabin's portholes showed only the inside of the Mitsubishi refitting dock. It may as well have been the inside an airplane hanger. Only a few shafts of sunlight penetrated the superstructure of gantries, cranes, and scaffolding. The Miss Artiphys lay elevated in the world's most advanced commercial dry dock. She was being extensively modified; so extensively that the normal practice would have been to build a new ship from scratch. Instead, because of her owner's whims, she was being entirely rebuilt. It should have been legally required to rename and relicense her. Kori Polemos wanted neither. Because of the company's status in Japan, the authorities were accommodating, especially since the ship's registry was foreign. On paper, her vessel was only being refurbished. In reality, the marine engineers at Mitsubishi were completely recreating the ship for their stockholder, incorporating the results of several lines of research she'd instituted.

The company built ships, worked in aerospace and energy generating, and a myriad of other fields. As she had foreseen years before, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries could provide the wide range of capabilities her campaign required, and she had given to them in return. They had been conducting research for her in a number of fields for several years and were benefiting from her teams' discoveries. Now the industrial conglomerate would provide all the skills and services Kori's $67 billion corporation could want. Their partnership was cordial and profitable. The Board of Directors would keep her happy.

Kori had brought her ship into Yokohama two months ago, in early November. Even working in teams around the clock, the work would take another two months. The recreated Miss Artiphys would be ready to sail at the beginning of March.

In another factory nearby, other preparations were hastily underway. For the past six months, Mitsubishi Marine had been fabricating components. As soon as the Miss Artiphys was out of the dry dock, the assembly of another project for Kori Polemos would begin with the laying down of a cylindrical, titanium, double-walled pressure hull 400 feet in length.

_**June 1, 2005 - Columbia, South Carolina**_

The man in the policeman's uniform walked to the boarded up storefront and stood on the sidewalk, silently looking up at the sign that still hung over the display window. The "Columbia School of Martial Science", it proclaimed in black type over a blue field. Flanking the lettering were two decorated rings. They were really the opposite sides of the same ring, he knew now, but on the day that he'd first seen that sign he'd had no idea what they signified. They had been something new, something ancient, and the first clue in the biggest mystery he would ever face. Like the building itself, they had symbolized changes to come. So many things had changed since that day.

For years the premises had been run down and empty. He'd passed it daily since his time as a rookie, and it had always been the same. Then over a single month there had been a flurry of activity. The space had suddenly been renovated; it had happened almost overnight. At first he'd paid it only passing attention, mildly pleased to see that a new business was opening. Then the sign had been hung, just as the contractors were finishing up. The patrolman had been very curious about the school, because he'd studied the fighting arts for many years. His younger partner was a student as well.

One morning the door had stood open when they came by on their patrol. He and his partner had been the first to enter it. On that summer day they'd stood and watched as a tall brunette and a short blonde had sparred with ancient weapons, the sai against the sabre of Chin. They'd stood and watched in amazement.

"Four years ago today," Alexander Williams whispered as he gazed up at the sign. "I learned so much in those few short months...we all did. And I came away with more questions than answers."

After that last fight against the mysterious stranger, he'd never seen either of his teachers again. Gabriella Covington was almost certainly dead. He himself had taken a dangerous slash across the chest, and his wife had sustained a concussion that night. The stranger's blade had sliced between two of his ribs, partly severing his sternum and passing within a quarter inch of his heart. His last memory of that night was of Gabriella's body draped in Serena's arms as the tall teacher had walked out of the school and into the night. She'd been dazed, barely conscious of her surroundings, and oblivious to anyone but the person lying in her arms. After that, Serena had disappeared.

There'd been talk in the station house. He'd first heard the gossip while still lying in his hospital bed, but he'd been weeks late in hearing all the details. By the time he went back on duty the story had been old and tainted with conjecture. He'd learned that Serena Pappas had said nothing during an all night grilling with two detectives. The next morning she'd been taken by two FBI agents. Those agents were at the heart of the rumors that had circulated through the station house. The detectives had seen their FBI IDs, and so had the captain, but a patrolman had also seen one of the agents at the school after the first attack the week before. On that night, he'd identified himself as a DEA agent. When Alex had asked what that agent looked like, the patrolman had given him a description that could have fit Harry Tasker. But Alex Williams knew that Harry sold business computer systems. He'd never given Alex any reason to doubt his identity. In any case, those suspicions seemed academic now. Two years ago Harry had moved his family back to McLean, Va., the Washington, D.C. suburb where he'd come from.

The FBI agents had taken all the case records at the same time they'd taken Serena Pappas into custody. There hadn't been so much as a fingerprint card left. Even Danielle Lefferts, (who was still house-sitting at the Pappas residence after three and a half years), hadn't heard anything from Serena. Alex had kept in contact with her and the other students. He knew that an attorney for the Pappas estate had informed her that she was welcome to stay indefinitely, and had arranged very generous payments to her for maintaining the property. Those payments had continued after the Pappas estate had been acquired by Artiphys International, a subsidiary of the DON GROUP, Inc., whatever that was. For all practical purposes, any evidence of Serena Pappas had been wiped away. Yet he could still feel the presence of the two teachers when he stood in their odd study at the Halloween gatherings. Like his teachers with their collection of ancient weapons, the students were clinging to a past that had affected them deeply.

Serena and Gabriella's disappearance was only one of many changes. The whole world had changed in the four years since he and his partner had first stepped through the school's door. His partner, Marcus Lewis, was gone, dead almost four years ago in the hijacked plane that had crashed on September 11, 2001. The United States had waged war on Iraq and Afghanistan, where they had used weapons of mass destruction. There had been major plagues in the Sudan, North Korea, and China. Throughout the nation, the poor were being herded into what were really concentration camps, where they were used as slave labor. People on public assistance were being forced to volunteer as test subjects for drug companies. Beginning with the economically marginalized, the rights of citizenship were being denied with the approval of the rest of the population. America had turned its back as liberties that had first been enumerated in the Declaration of Independence were abridged. The rights to, _"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"_, that predated the Constitution, were regarded as having been superseded by that later document and its less clearly worded articles and amendments.

That population had supported the abridgement of the second amendment to the Constitution, _"... the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."_ By interpreting the entire statement of the second amendment, (_"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed,"_),to mean that only members of the military were to be protected by this right, the Supreme Court had ruled firearms illegal for all other citizens. The ownership of firearms by law enforcement officers had been accommodated by placing all law enforcement under the Office of Homeland Security, and placing that office within the Continental Militia. The Continental Militia was organized as a military force and had absorbed the National Guard. They had a Chief of Staff among the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and were conceived of as the equivalent of the Coast Guard on land.

In all these changes, Alex Williams saw the gathering of power under a government that was increasingly unfettered by checks and balances. In the world at large, he saw the US exercising its military might with ever fewer restraints. Whether by acts of war or due to the results of suspicious epidemics, the influence of his country's leadership was being advanced internationally. He sensed the rise of a single power, both at home and abroad, that dealt with opposition in an expedient and bloodthirsty manner. It chilled his blood. He was smart enough to know that power without limit usually turned into tyranny, and in the real world, such limits were most often imposed by the presence of enemies. Without the threat of hostile military action, law and ethics, morals and conscience all quickly lost influence when balanced against greed, ambition, and the will to dominate.

Alexander Williams took a last look up at the sign and then turned away. His patrol route took him to the Congressional Diner and he decided to stop in for a cup of coffee. The diner's atmosphere always seemed to sooth his psyche when he was feeling morose. Inside and out it was unchanged as always, the stainless steel shell shiny, the neon bright, and the tiles sparkling clean; its mundane continuity was precious and welcome amidst unpredictable changes. The diner harked back to simpler times, providing a comforting reminder of a world that seemed more rosy now than when the Cold War, H-bombs, and communism had actually been threats.

Officer Williams pushed the door open and glanced around inside. In the first booth, The Platters crooned, "Only You", on a tabletop jukebox. Behind the counter Angie turned to greet her entering customer. A smile lit her face as she recognized him.

"Hiya, Officer Alex," she bubbled, reaching for a coffee cup and saucer. She was twenty-one now, heartbreakingly beautiful, clean, cheerful, and wholesome. She'd turned down offers from modeling agencies and talent scouts so she could continue managing the diner for Ray and Lynn, her foster parents, because being with them here in Columbia made her happy. The onetime runaway from Texas had never ceased to be thankful for the family that had found and cared for her.

"Hi, Angie," Alex said, unable to keep the smile off his face in reaction to her boundless positive energy, "you look gorgeous as always, hon."

When she came over to the stool he'd taken and set the coffee down in front of him on the counter, he plunked his hat on her head. She grinned while adjusting it slightly over her hair and then announced, "Lynn made some sticky buns and they are soooo yummy. Chock full a' cinnamon and chopped peeeecans. Y'all really oughta try one."

"You know I can't resist her baking any more than I can resist Ray's cooking," the policeman confessed. He said it loud enough to carry to the rear booth where he'd seen the owner engaged in a conversation with a man he could only see from the back.

Ray glanced up and gave him a smile of thanks for the compliment as Angie bounced away towards the desert case. The man he'd been talking to turned in the booth and startled Alex. It was Harry Tasker. He smiled and waved the officer over to join them. Alex wouldn't have missed the chance to chat for the world. He picked up his coffee and walked to the rear booth.

"Hello, Harry, it's good to see you," Alex said honestly as he reached out and shook the agent's hand. "We've missed you and Helen at the last couple Halloween gatherings." The man looked careworn to Alex, and though he was still robust, he seemed to have aged more than two years.

"Alex, good to see you too," Harry said, "Helen and Dana and I have missed our friends down here in Columbia, but it's been a busy couple years. I hope you and Karen are well." He slid over in the booth to let Alex sit down beside him facing Ray.

"We're fine, Harry," Alex assured him, "and I'm glad to hear your family's okay."

"Harry's been consulting with me because he's an amateur historian," Ray injected. It was a surprise to Alex. At that moment, Angie delivered a desert plate with a sticky bun on it. She handed Alex a napkin, and then joined them and sat down next to Ray.

"I've been asking Ray about some details from the Xena Scrolls that Serena and Gabriella's great aunts, Melinda and Janice discovered," Harry said. "I became interested in their history when I was living next door and found out who they were."

The claim held double meanings that Alex sensed but didn't understand.

"Harry's become interested in someone called the Destroyer of Nations, a.k.a., the Hellene's Bane," Ray said. "Since you knew Serena and Gabriella, you might be interested in this bit of history."

"Especially since you've witnessed its repercussions," Harry added, "and felt them too."

Alex unconsciously stroked the scar across his chest.

"You were present both times when the school was attacked," Harry said, "and I'd like to know what you felt, especially during that second attack."

For several moments Alexander Williams was lost in the recollections of those nights. They were indelibly etched in his memories. After almost three and a half years he could still see the fights when he closed his eyes. It had been a final awakening for him. In his teachers he'd glimpsed the gravity of ancient combat and the spirit they mustered that was unknown in the modern world. In battle he'd seen their abilities applied at a level he'd never known existed. He'd spent his life training for combat, and on those nights he'd discovered that he'd never be ready; that he'd lacked even the chance to achieve such proficiency, and that time had deprived him of the years to gain what his teachers and their enemies displayed. In their fighting skills he'd seen the apotheosis of his own life's ambitions, but rendered at an unattainable plateau beyond his dreams. One could not achieve that which he could not first conceive. He shook his head. Those fights had dashed his hopes and at the same time granted him a deep relief, for his daily life would never depend on skills he couldn't attain.

"I felt helpless," he admitted softly, "I'd studied the fighting arts for almost thirty years and when the time came, I was unprepared for the test. We all felt that way. We watched in horror and awe and knew that we'd never be ready."

Harry and Ray looked down at the table. Alex's words were an admission of defeat in a life's quest, and they respected his loss. Harry had seen the footage of both fights at the school and the one at the temple. He'd studied and analyzed it, and had admitted the same thing himself. The agent who'd once fought and defeated a hostile off-world hunter in a South American jungle had found an enemy that he could fear.

"None of you had a chance to match them, Alex," Harry said, "there is no one living who can. In their element, Serena, Gabriella, Callisto, Mavican, and Elainis are something beyond any of us." Harry paused for a moment. He looked at the expression of intense interest on Alex's face and then continued. "They partake of a heritage and spirit that is thousands of years old. Such warriors ceased to exist when their gods faded and mankind chose its own destiny. What they excelled at became unnecessary as warfare evolved, just as their gods became obsolete as civilization evolved. As I said, none of us can match them, but at the same time, they are all millennia out of date."

"With one exception. The Destroyer of Nations is supremely adaptable," Ray said, "and she sees tactics and strategies as timeless. Only the details and assets are updated as necessary. She appeared infrequently in the Xena Scrolls, and only then in times of great wrath. She was an aspect of Xena's personality, and in later years, usually the avenging demon. Gabrielle also wrote of her past history, in the years before they met. She was favored by the God of War and was unbeatable in personal combat. At the age of 24 she conquered half of Greece with an army of 6,500. That's like taking over this country with a conventional force of maybe 20,000. Then she walked away from it all following a defeat that she could have regrouped from. In all of Greek history, she was the only one to resist the siren's call of conquest."

"Alex, I was wondering what you remember of Serena's fighting with respect to her tactics or her attitude," Harry asked.

Officer Williams considered the question carefully. There had been that moment when his teachers had faced Callisto and Mavican, and Serena had changed. She'd answered her enemy's taunts with derision and done so in a voice so cold that it had sent chills up his spine. During the fighting she'd pursued Callisto with deadly intent as a bloodthirsty mania possessed her. By the fight's end, she'd been seething with lust for her enemy's death. During the second fight Serena had been just as proficient, but then the stranger had threatened Gabriella. Serena had become a demon, blindly inflicting whatever damage she could. He could still hear the sickening crunch as the stranger's elbow had been wrenched out of joint. And afterwards she'd been in a world of her own.

"There was a point in each fight when it seemed like Serena unleashed some rage that she normally held in check. Her focus narrowed to the exclusion of everything but the death of her enemy. It was like she was driven or possessed," Alex said, "and that's the only way I can describe it. It was like there was a killer inside her that came out and went on the rampage."

"That's an apt description," Ray Fell said, "and it agrees with Gabrielle's reports from over two thousand years ago. In her scroll, _Hooves and Harlots_, the bard tells of Xena's revenge on a warlord who had attacked the Amazons and killed her son. She cut him to shreds and brought back pieces of his body in a sack, after single handedly slaughtering three dozen of his men."

Alexander Williams regarded him with horrified astonishment.

"You're talking about people that lived in ancient times and relating them to my teacher as if they're one in the same." Alex was baffled. "Just who are we talking about here?"

"In a way, they are one in the same," Harry answered, "Serena and the Destroyer."

"She always seemed nice, but she was dangerous too," Angie added. "They both were, but there was something inside Xena that was like, waaay severe."

Alex looked at her. The diner was just a block from the school, and at first he assumed that Angie had met Serena and Gabriella here after the school opened. Then he realized that she'd called his teacher Xena.

"Did you meet her here?" He asked, not wanting to lead her answer with his question.

"No," Angie replied openly. "We met them before, in California." Ray Fell winced.

Both Harry Tasker and Alex Williams sat frozen by her response. They stared at the pair across the booth. Ray looked around nervously. Finally he cleared his throat.

"Perhaps it's time for all of us to lay our cards on the table, so to speak," Dr. Fell said. "I suspect that each of us has some information the others would like to know." He looked pointedly at Harry who groaned in response. He certainly had the most secrets and there was no way he could share them all. Still he nodded his assent, as did Alex.

"It sounds like there was a lot I didn't know about Serena and Gabriella," Alex said, "but I guess I always knew that. They said and did things that made me wonder about them the first time that my partner and I saw them at the school. It as brand new then; in fact we were the first people to go in the day it opened. That was four years ago today."

"We'd met them in late April, over a year before," Ray told them as Angie nodded in agreement, "in a campground outside of Los Angeles. The first time we saw them they were dressed in costumes from the TV show. Xena sang to a tune Allan was playing on his flute. She sang it the way it was sung in ancient Amphipolis, in the correct dialect and with the proper pronunciation, not as it was performed for the TV show's soundtrack. Despite all that, they'd never actually seen the show. Later when they did, they resented a lot of what they saw. Not only were they unfamiliar with the series' episodes, they also knew things that weren't in the scrolls. They knew the chronological order the scrolls fell in, something Janice and Mel were never certain of. I spent a lot of time talking with them about their history, on the road while I was bringing them here to Columbia. I wanted them to meet Janice, but more than that, I wanted Janice to meet them."

"I never knew where they came from," Alex confessed. "I checked and there were no records of them before they came here. That would have been in June of 2000."

And now it was Harry Tasker's turn. He knew more than the others, and what he'd just learned filled in most of the holes. He made a quick decision about how much he could share.

"The day I moved in next door to them, Serena came charging out and accused me of trying to run the two of them down on my motorcycle. She said that was near City of Industry...Los Angeles. I thought she was nuts." He shrugged. "I can't tell you everything...I can't even tell you why...but I can tell you that Serena and Gabriella were Xena and Gabrielle in all the ways that mattered. Somehow two ancients came to life in our time and lived among us for a while. I can tell you that during that time, Xena was subjected to the loss of her soulmate at the hands of an ancient enemy. I don't believe that she's dead and I don't believe that she will forego the chance to take her revenge. According to the scrolls, it was at just such times that she became the Destroyer of Nations. Isn't that right, Ray?" The scholar nodded his head in agreement. Harry added, "I believe the Hellene's Bane will be going to war."

It was Dr. Fell who was most affected by Harry's words. Alex was still chewing on the idea that his teachers had somehow actually been ancient warriors. Dr. Fell understood from years of study and a lifetime of belief just what Harry's claims implied.

"If Xena still lives and goes to war as the Destroyer of Nations, then she goes to war with the Blessing of her patron god," he told them gravely. The other two looked at him, not really comprehending the gravity of his statement. He looked from one to the other. "Xena may well have the Blessing of the God of War, and if so, then she is fated to prevail in battle. She was already his Favorite, his Chosen warrior...."

Harry and Alex regarded him without understanding, though Harry remembered Xena's words of warning aboard the plane over Columbia after the second attack on her school. _"I can't fight a war against this enemy alone. You will build me an army."_ It had been the first time that he'd felt the full force of her personality. He'd witnessed that compelling and commanding bearing many times since, but he'd never suspected that it might have a supernatural source.

"What does that all mean, Ray?" The Omega Sector agent asked.

"Xena was Ares' chosen mortal emissary. She was his most favored warrior. As a fighter she was unbeatable to mortal warriors, and she was a brilliant general. If you read _Sins of the Past_, Gabrielle's accounts of her campaigns as a warlord, you'll understand just how inspiring and tactically peerless she was. I can only recall one general getting the best of her after she became Ares' Favorite. That was Julius Caesar on the day he kidnapped her daughter, and she repaid him with a dozen years of mayhem before taking her back. She and Gabrielle lost a final battle with Callisto, but..." Ray paused, bit his lip, and refrained from stating all of his doubts. "I've always been suspicious about what happened that day. In any case, if Xena has gone to war to avenge Gabrielle's death, then she will be without the balance of her soulmate's influence, and she will be the Destroyer of Nations. This is extremely important. Gabrielle had a restraining influence on Xena all through their years together. Without that influence, Xena tended toward unrestrained violence when facing an enemy."

The scholar shifted his gaze fully to Alex and told him, "what you saw during the fights at the school was the tip of the iceberg, as they say."

"Are you saying that without Gabrielle to keep her under control, Xena goes nuts?"

Ray regarded Alex's question for a moment. As with most things he'd learned by studying the soulmates' history, it wasn't so simple. Human behavioral psychology only applied with them up to a point because it was a modern study of modern people. Xena and Gabrielle were ancients, and they had been a special case even in their own world.

"Harry, do you recall reading the scroll entitled _Bad Rye_?" Ray asked.

"That was Gabrielle's account of Xena's ergot poisoning," Harry said. "Yes, I remember it. I remember that Xena had a number of hallucinations and delusions."

"Xena was affected by ergotism almost immediately after their return to Greece from their first trip to Chin...China," Ray explained, "specifically, the Kingdom of Lao. At that time, Gabrielle recorded some of Xena's ranting involving her paternal abandonment issues. The story was that her father, a Thracian warrior named Atrius, had abandoned the family and joined Mithridates' forces during his first campaign, in about 94 or 95 BC. The problem is that the dates don't match. Mithridates was still fighting in Anatolia in 88 BC. Atrius may or may not have gone off to war...some war...but the bottom line is that he never returned. Xena missed having a father, resented his absence, and at the same time aspired to follow in his footsteps as a warrior. It may explain her devotion to her first teacher, Mithridates. Later, when Ares became her mentor and made her his Chosen, she may have seen him as a father figure. During one bout of delusions, Gabrielle reports that Xena asked the Fates, _"Moirae, who claims me as the Daughter of War? Atrius, the mortal who abandoned me, or Ares, the God who chose me? By my own choice I'm a child of war...grown, trained, and pledged. Ares is a truer father to me than Atrius ever was. What say the strands?"_

Dr. Fell paused for a moment to catch his breath and then continued as if lecturing a class of two. "I don't really think either of them took the statement literally at the time. But later, in 53 BC, Gabrielle relates another incident in her scroll, _One Against An Army_, that shows something of a change in her own beliefs. Gabrielle chronicles a battle in the mountainous land north of Lake Prespa, in western Macedonia. She and Xena engaged a _manipuli_ of Roman legionnaires, numbering about 160 soldiers. For help they had twenty members of the local banditry, questionable allies at best. The fighting broke out just after dawn. Casualties among the Romans and bandits were high; Gabrielle claims the bandits were astonishingly inept, more of a liability than an asset really. After about a half-hour, the remaining dozen bandits tried to switch sides. The Roman officers ordered their men to slaughter them, but their treachery had inflamed Xena. The bard tells of the bandits caught between Xena and the Roman line, but it was Xena who slaughtered almost all of them. After a short rest she attacked the phalanx with a maneuver called, the 'Annihilation of the Line'. Although we have no knowledge of what this maneuver was, according to Gabrielle, its results were highly effective. There were probably still over 125 legionnaires. Gabrielle claims to have dispatched 26. According to her, Xena proceeded to slay almost all of the remaining hundred in the battle lines before the end of the second candlemark, in such a display of bloodlust that Ares himself appeared on the field to celebrate her dominance. His words were, _"Magnificent daughter of my spirit. You honor our blood with blood."_ Gabrielle wrote, _"The Destroyer of Nations is truly the daughter of War."_

"It was clear from Gabrielle's commentary that she believed Ares had claimed Xena in both spirit and blood. To the ancients, the god's wording was not only a statement of pride in a devotee, but also an actual claim of kinship. There was no comma, no pause between _magnificent _and _daughter_, so the statement can carry a double meaning. The God of War was confirming a longstanding rumor in something just shy of explicit terms...that Xena had been fathered by the God of War himself. His semantics left just enough room for a skeptic to doubt. In Gabrielle's wording, _kori Polemos_ is not a title but a relationship."

Alexander Williams immediately expressed his disbelief. "You're claiming that the ancient Greek gods actually existed and that Xena was the daughter of the God of War?"

"Yes to both questions, Alex," Dr. Fell replied with a chuckle, "and without Gabrielle, Xena was prone to an unquenchable _katalepsis_, or battle mania. She craved slaughter."

Harry Tasker remembered the report from the geneticist who had tested samples of the clones' hair in November of 2001. _The spot mutation is much more ancient...probably closer to 2,000 years old. It affects the creation of the molecules used in energy production in all the cells of these individuals' bodies. My colleagues and I have hazarded some guesses...that these individuals are able to metabolize at about 14% greater efficiency than an Olympic athlete, and perhaps 42% or more efficiently than an average person. They would be stronger, quicker, and heal faster._ A two thousand-year-old chromosomal mutation allowed Xena to outperform any normal mortal. After seeing the footage of Xena's fight at the temple, the agent could believe that her abilities had a divine origin. It was the only explanation he'd heard for such a perfectly targeted effect. Random mutation hadn't conferred the warrior's hereditary advantage. Random mutation hadn't made her disappear from his plane in a flash of blue light either.

"I'd like to pose a hypothetical question," Harry said to Ray Fell, "please bear with me here. If Xena were the God of War's Chosen, and she was waging war with his blessing, then knowing what you know, who would her most likely enemies be?" He paused and collected his thoughts, giving Dr. Fell a moment to recall his questions almost three and a half years ago about the "bright" chakram. Harry hoped that Alex would assume he was referring only to the scholar's academic knowledge. "Which of the God of War's enemies might attack his Favorite as an assault by proxy on him?"

Ray considered the question carefully. It wasn't as though any modern scholar fully understood the dynamics of the relationships between the gods. There were almost no surviving first person accounts of meetings with immortals. Almost everything known about them was hearsay or outright myth. It simply wasn't possible for him to make an intelligent statement or provide an answer based on fact.

"According to some sources, most of the Olympians regarded Ares as barbaric, and yet he presided over necessary, if unsavory, aspects of warfare. Other sources portray him as inspiring mortal warriors to bravery, glorious combat, and conquest. As for animosities between the Olympians carried from ancient times into the present, well, I really can't express any certainties based on what I know. I have no proof that any of those gods still exist. I can submit two highly speculative conjectures..." here Ray paused. Presenting unsupported opinions wasn't really part of his academic approach. It was an amateurish procedure and demonstrated very poor scientific methods. Harry nodded for him to continue. "The first would be the Goddess Athena, with whom Ares shared dominion over warfare, because in the present, warfare partakes increasingly of science and technology...our modern wisdom, which is her other primary domain. The second would be the God Apollo, not for his rule of the sun, but because he was sovereign over the healing arts and diseases. Medicine has progressed in the modern world, often to heal the ravages of war, while biological weapons are highly developed...as are emerging plagues. Whether either of these deities are present in the modern world though...?" He left the question hanging and shrugged.

Alex shook his head in disbelief. He simply couldn't take this line of enquiry seriously. His closest approach to religion had been in the Baptist Church as a child. The paths of mysticism and devotion to faith were not his way. As he grew up, he'd accepted his natural inclinations towards reason and the investigation of facts. He'd also been a down to earth guy, not a dreamer, and he'd never liked being cooped up indoors. Alexander's value of what could be observed and proven, coupled with his strong practical sense, had helped lead him to a career in police work rather than the life of a scientist.

Harry however, gave Ray's words serious consideration. Unlike Alexander, Harry Tasker could believe in ancient gods. Two decades before, he'd fought for his life against a trophy hunting alien predator, and so contact with the unexpected wasn't beyond his experience. He'd seen the enemy clones and destroyed their lab. Xena herself had claimed,_ "no matter what you want to believe, you are fightin' a goddess, and that goddess is cloning her own army."_ His money was on Athena. The idea of two war gods contesting over the conduct of battle, as it changed in the modern world, rang true for him. Perhaps it was because he was a warrior himself. And then there was the fact that if Ares and Apollo were at war, would the God of the Sun have allowed Xena, his enemy's Favorite, to take his own weapon, the Chakram of Day? Not likely, Harry thought.

Across the booth from him, Ray was regarding him with a knowing expression. The man was the foremost living authority on Xena and Gabrielle, their lives, and their minds. He was a treasure trove of knowledge that Harry had found invaluable, but beyond that, he held a disciplined spirit of inquiry and an inquisitive intelligence that illustrated the hallmark curiosity of mankind. Beside Ray, Angie was absentmindedly twirling a wavy blonde lock of hair around a finger and humming softly. She couldn't carry a tune to save her life but she possessed an innocent goodness that the agent knew he'd fight to save from harm. Next to him, Alexander Williams finished his coffee. The policeman was a skeptic, streetwise, but not cynical. In his own way he was a warrior and a servant of the Greater Good, a day to day guardian of society against its own worst elements. He was honorable and commendable, and probably often went unthanked.

Protecting these people, and the millions of citizens like them, was Harry's reason for being. He'd spent over three decades, first as an army commando, then as a covert rescue team leader, and most recently as an Omega Sector agent, fighting the forces that had threatened his country and its peoples' way of life. Most of that time he'd spent in the shadows, his actions classified, his affiliations and battles undocumented. Most of the time he'd come out on top, but he'd left a trail of bodies along the way. Given the choice, he'd do it again. Almost all of it.

Today he found himself in the position of being allied with someone he saw as only the lesser of two evils. Aiding the Destroyer of Nations against her Olympian enemy wasn't a clear-cut choice between good and evil. If anything, assisting Xena would lead to a dictatorship amidst the ruins of nations blasted to rubble in the coming war. Yet the alternative was unthinkable. Allowing things to continue without aiding Xena would lead to a dictatorship that would last forever because the dictator herself was immortal. In that world, the passage of time wouldn't bring a return to a recognizable way of life.

If the Hellenes' Bane prevailed, perhaps mankind would someday rule itself again. And so he would continue along the path that Spencer Trilby had accepted. He would work to further the plan Xena had decreed. He was abetting the coming war, promoting the slaughter, and insuring the destruction of his country and his way of life. Everything he'd worked for would disappear in flames, but just maybe, his daughter Dana's descendants would someday sign a constitution, vote for their leaders, and live under the rule of law.

Outside the diner it was a bright summer day. The sun was shining and Columbia moved to the rhythm of peace. In less than a year, an army would stand ready, and then war would follow. There was one hope. It was a slim chance, scarcely better than no chance at all. It was something only he and Spencer Trilby remembered, and it was unpredictable and uncontrollable. Before the day that Xena claimed her army, the second phase would also be complete.

**_"An ally bought is an enemy for sale."_**

The Destroyer of Nations

_**July 6, 2005 - Gangplank Marina, SW Washington, D.C.**_

**Washington, D.C. **- In a press release this morning, the Pentagon announced the first successful test of the Mach 5 cruise missile. A spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff claimed that the weapon, successfully tested for the third time yesterday in the Pacific, covered about 800 miles and struck its target, "...at over 3,500 mph, and with devastating accuracy." The test was monitored by satellite and AWACS planes near the target. The new missile, (designated the "Mach 5 Joint Stand-Off Attack Missile", or M5JSAM), will be deployed for use on surface ships, submarines, aircraft, and ground launchers. The configuration mates a modified Sprint Hercules X-265 booster with a scramjet that can carry a wide range of munitions.

**Pyongyang, North Korea** - Radio transmissions were intercepted yesterday between a North Korean destroyer in the mid-Pacific, and the Peoples Bureau of Naval Command. The message reported that the ship's radar registered an unknown object approaching at extreme speed shortly before communications ceased. The transmission, recorded by an USAF AWACS plane that happened to be nearby, was not followed by any further transmissions. Pyongyang has made no official comment, however a special envoy has been dispatched to the United Nations to request an investigation into the loss of the destroyer and two other ships.

**New York City** - Bancroft Adams, head of the US delegation to the United Nations, has called for a vote on the pending resolution to bar non-members from appealing to the international body for assistance. The measure is expected to pass.

**Sacramento, California** - The California State Legislature has passed the Alien Labor Act with a vote of 134 to 7 with 17 abstentions. According to the Labor Act, state law will now allow undocumented aliens to apply for provisional citizenship in exchange for five years of volunteer labor. "We've provided a mechanism by which all who would aspire to American citizenship will be able to work, demonstrate their industriousness, and provide this state with much needed manual skills," said representative Patty Hearst after the votes were tabulated. The law will allow the state to employ the needed laborers for agricultural harvesting, brush fire fighting, and highway maintenance, while maintaining the falling state budget. Wages will not be governed by the minimum wage laws, since the workers will not be US citizens. The wages will be calculated to be on par with the prevailing wages in the workers' place of origin, about $200/yr in the case of some rural areas of Mexico and Guatemala. Labor unions and advocates for illegal immigrants have protested the measure, however their suit for a restraint of implementation of the new law has been denied by the State Supreme Court.

"Cynical bastards," Kori Polemos muttered as her pager buzzed against her hip. She tossed the copy of the Washington Post onto the bench beside her and took a quick glance down at its screen. It displayed a string of numbers. It wasn't a phone number, though, but rather a simple alpha-numeric cipher which provided important news in military code words from ancient Greece.

That night the Destroyer of Nations waited in a white step van in the alley behind the 1000 block of E St., NW. It was a man-made slot canyon, three to five stories deep and barely a lane wide, ample for deliveries by dogcart back in the 19th century. Overhead, fire escapes clung to the backs of the buildings, their railings barely two yards apart. They were accompanied by a cobweb of power and phone wires, TV cables, junction boxes, antennas, and clotheslines. Chunks of fallen masonry lay alongside walls of tired bricks, weakened and eroded by two centuries of standing in the city of scandals.

The L-shaped alley was deserted as well as dingy. It hosted only a few small dumpsters, garbage cans, and piles of refuse. Those denizens lurked in the shadows beyond the small halos glowing from a half-dozen bare light bulbs in rusted fixtures beside locked doors. The cobble-paved way backed the Lincoln House Restaurant and the house where Lincoln died, passing through the middle of the block from E to F Sts., across 10th St from Ford's Theater. It was the unseen and unsightly loading access for the block diagonally across E St. from the hulking J. Edgar Hoover FBI building. The step van was silent and dark as Xena sat waiting in the shadows near the corner of the "L".

Her ears picked up a rustle and a scrape. In a less godforsaken alley she might have attributed it to rats. The sound came again, and Xena pinpointed it and fixed her eyes on the source. The old-fashioned storm cellar door behind 1005 E St. shifted and then creaked open. One side rose and swung up on corroded hinges. Softly, hands laid it to rest against the building and then a figure rose into the alley. Xena moved from her seat and slid the passenger door open. The figure slipped inside. She was dressed in black BDUs and heavily armed.

"_Strategos_, the _chiliarchoi_ are waiting," she said. Her eyes never stopped scanning the alley. Her expression never changed; it reflected neither happiness at their meeting, nor anything but concentration on her duties. She appeared no different from that last time Xena had seen her, fifteen months before.

"Proceed, Secunda, then resume your post," Xena told the guardian. "I'll contact you in early December. Contact me again when the _hecatontarches_ are ready."

The second "special" nodded once, then immediately turned and motioned to the watchers inside the darkened cellar entrance. Quickly and silently, eight figures hastened up into the alley and entered the van one by one. The guardian stood aside, her eyes sweeping the alley for possible threats, her senses projected outwards. When the last figure had entered the van, Xena slid the door closed. Secunda moved to the cellar door and moments later had drawn it closed after her as she disappeared below ground again. With a faint rasp, a series of failsafe mechanisms engaged. Even if it were forced open, all that would be found inside was a depressing underground storage space packed to the ceiling beams with worthless antique junk.

Xena took a quick look behind the driver's seat at her passengers. Each looked back at her in silent concentration. Each looked identical to the guardian and to herself. The _strategos_ nodded in satisfaction. She turned around and started the engine, and then eased the step van up the alley and out onto F St. Fifteen minutes later she was pulling up to the "T" slip where the Miss Artiphys was berthed. A half hour after bringing in the _chiliarchoi_, Kori and Prima stood watch over the eight figures as they lay in the cabin absorbing their uploads.

"Prima, make ready to cast off," Kori told the "special". "Take us out to the first rendezvous." With a nod, the clone headed for the bridge.

Soon the throbbing of the channel motor was vibrating the hull as the vessel headed out of the Gangplank Marina and into the Washington Channel, moving toward the Potomac River. She passed Greenleaf Point and the mouth of the Anacostia River, and then Haines Point at the tip of East Potomac Park. Entering the Potomac, Prima radioed the Coast Guard station and cleared her coarse to the Chesapeake Bay.

Across the softly lapping water, the beacons at Reagan International Airport winked red in the darkness. Prima looked ahead for the buoy that marked the downstream lane and nosed the rebuilt 120-foot craft into the right of way. Once in the lane, she secured the channel motor and switched over to the main engines. Within the hull, a pair of waterjet turbines came online and bow waves marked the ship's passage as it gained speed. Prima brought the reactor to one quarter power and the Miss Artiphys surged forward, coming to twelve knots as she headed due south past Olde Towne Alexandria. The "special" could feel the ship chaffing at the bit, tugged upward by the cutting edge hydrodynamics that had been incorporated when she'd been rebuilt in Yokohama. Eleven miles down river, just past Fort Washington, Prima steered hard to starboard, rounding the curve near Mt. Vernon. Her eyes flicked upwards, marking the moon's position; it was barely midnight. Over the next three miles she edged the heading back to port until the ship was again headed south, only to repeat the maneuver passing around Mason Neck. For the following twenty miles she gradually steered to port, following the river's course as it curved east. In the river's darkness the black hull and bridge became a ghostly shadow on the water, like a hole in the dancing reflected sheet of stars, with only a small beacon strobe and the whisper of water marking the big power foil's passage.

Ahead lay an s-curve, hard to port, then hard to starboard, and finally a gradual curve to port down thirty miles of river, until the Miss Artiphys finally entered the upper Chesapeake Bay at Point Lookout. Once in the bay, Prima would nudge the reactor up to one third, bringing the Miss Artiphys to eighteen knots. At that speed she'd extend the pylons fully, and the hull would rise clear of the surface. The reduced friction would require adjustments on the annunciator to control the reactor output/velocity relationship. Eighteen knots was only 20% of the Miss Artiphys' flank speed. At last, seventy miles down the bay, the ship would pass Cape Henry and head out into the Atlantic.

Upon reaching the ocean, the "special" would set a course due east and accelerate to sixty knots, or two thirds of the reactor's output. By then the hull would be riding four feet above the surface, skiing on a tripod of shock dampened wings in full hydrofoil mode. The autopilot would maintain that course for just over seven hours, until the first rendezvous point was reached, but Prima would remain on the bridge, standing watch behind the wheel, her eyes surveying the empty sea for potentially hostile contacts.

In the cabin, Kori watched over the eight _chiliarchoi_ as they assimilated the information about her past. They would take a half-day to absorb a lifetime of personal history. It was not just the history of the ancient Xena, but also the life of her clone in the present. Footage from Harry's surveillance had fleshed out the historic material with the fights at the school and the temple, the mission to Georgia, and the killing of Gabrielle. They would learn the same animosities that drove the Destroyer herself.

After that, she would begin their training as "commanders of a thousand". She would give them the modern tactics, the updated battle doctrine, and the mission perameters that they would employ against her enemy. They would serve as her captains in the most deadly army the world had ever seen. Three months hence they would train the eighty lieutenants, the _hecatontarches_, or commanders of a hundred. Soon they would wear the uniforms that Omega Sector had fabricated, and bear the weapons Mitsubishi had created. They would be blessed by their patron god.

Night passed to day. Dawn had greeted the Miss Artiphys in the lower Chesapeake. Hours had passed as the ship moved into the Atlantic. Now it was 1030 hours. From the bridge Prima watched over the empty sea, which lay relatively placid this morning, with the easterly wind running at two knots and raising only gentle swells. Traveling at sixty knots, the hydrofoil raised foaming bow waves from its foils, rudder, and suspension arms as the black, 120-foot vessel sailed due east under sparse clouds. At nine o'clock, Kori had ordered her to retract the shrouds, and now the superstructure sported a stubby four-foot diameter cylinder topped with a dome, and mounted amidships. Prima had activated the radar systems that would track incoming targets and the outgoing projectiles from the MK 15 20mm Phalanx system. The M-61A1 Gatling gun could fire 4,500 rounds per minute. It was a standard close in defensive weapon aboard US naval vessels.

The "special's" eyes snapped to the main hatch. The _strategos_ and the _chiliarchoi_ had just emerged from the salon, armed and wearing their uniforms. They moved to the flat surface of the main deck, ahead of and just below the bridge. Prima watched as they engaged in practical sword drills, moving at what would have been a fraction of combat speed for her. Though her eyes constantly flicked between the training area and the sea, she managed to pick up a few _xiphos _techniques from the _strategos_ as she fought off the other eight. The sword lessons continued for a couple of hours before switching to firearms.

3:00pm came on the water, gifted on that day with fickle Poseidon's tranquility, and the Miss Artiphys slowed. The _strategos_ had ordered all stop. Decelerating below fourteen knots, the hull sank into the surface. Now Prima simply maintained the vessel's position at station keeping with the retractable channel motor, which could be rotated 360º. Since entering the Atlantic Ocean, their course and speed had left them about 432 nautical miles, (or 497 statute miles), east of Virginia Beach. GPS reported their position as 70º0'0"W X 36º0'0"N.

The _chiliarchoi_ continued with their practice under Xena's watchful eyes. Prima watched as well while she wasn't attending to the monitoring of the ship. Everything remained calm as a couple more hours passed, then a warning sounded and Prima alerted the _strategos_. Passive sonar had reported a submerged vessel approaching.

The "special" reviewed her general's tactics for the upcoming meeting. She could find no flaw and decided that it would go according to Xena's plan. Even if they should be fired upon, the hydrofoil's resting draft with its pylons retracted was less then four feet, while at flank speed they would have virtually no draft and could easily outrun a torpedo. If anything happened while they were aboard during their meeting, she would take care of it.

The Russian Project 705 "Alfa class" attack submarine surfaced a furlong to the east. Retired from the Soviet northern fleet a dozen years before, the 14 nuclear powered Alfas had been recommissioned only last year by the Russian Navy. Capable of 41 knots, they were still the fastest military submarines ever built, although not the quietest or most sophisticated. Kori entered the bridge and stood beside Prima, watching the sub. A pair of officers appeared up on the sail, silhouetted against the light of the early evening sky. One signaled in Morse code with a handheld spotlight. The two clones silently translated the Russian and the _strategos_ answered with the response code using flashes of the strobe. One of the officers briefly disappeared, and then the sub slowly began to approach.

It took ten minutes for the cautious Russians to bring their vessel alongside the Miss Artiphys. The Alfa was small by modern naval standards, just over 265 feet in length compared to the 360 feet for an American Los Angeles class attack sub. It carried a crew of 45, compared to 129 aboard a Los Angeles class sub, and typical of the Russian Navy, a high proportion, (over two thirds), were officers. The Alfa also rode low in the water with barely a yard of hull above the waves. The top of the Russian sail was almost at eye level with the Miss Artiphys' bridge. Kori Polemos looked across 24 feet of space at the Russian captain, waved once in an abbreviated gesture, and then left the bridge with her laptop. Prima accompanied her to the starboard side of the hull and tossed a line over to the second Russian officer who had climbed down from the sail. He caught the line and tied it off to a cleat on the deck. When the vessels were tethered together bow and stern, Kori and Prima surprised the Russians by flipping across the narrow stretch of water between the ships.

Prima followed her _strategos_ up the handholds on the sail's side, to its top where they joined the officers and descended into the sub's bridge. It was a claustrophobic space, dim and filled with the accumulated stench of bodies in prolonged confinement, cigarette smoke, recycled air, and a trace scent of burnt electrical insulation. The "special" hated it at once. Kori followed the captain to a combination mess and conference room where the group seated themselves around a scarred metal table. Kori set the laptop on the table, opened it, and booted up the operating system.

"_$50,000 USD for 10 kilos of material," _she said in Russian. At the captain's nod, she added, _"I am prepared to purchase up to 50 kilos at this time, and another 50 kilos in three months."_

Smiles lit the faces of the two Russian officers. $250,000 was a fortune to them, and all for delivering the 110 lbs. of weapons grade plutonium that they'd smuggled out of a naval storage facility at a Northern Fleet base. It had been surprisingly easy. The storage facility's guards had looked away for a few hundred Euros. They would look away again a few months from now. The captain nodded to Kori.

_"The first delivery will be transferred to your ship as soon as we complete the wireless transfer of funds," _he said with a smile, _"and we shall certainly be able to deliver again in the future. You have but to contact us in the same manner as you did this time."_

_"Give me the account numbers," _Kori asked as she opened a program on her computer.

A web page opened showing the financial status and transfer of funds as a bar graph. Kori took the slip of paper from the captain and typed in the numbers to fill a box on the screen. The two officers looked over her shoulder as she typed in a password. The bar began to fill in green as the money moved from her Swiss account to theirs. She turned the screen towards the Russians so that they could watch their fortune grow. After twenty seconds a bell chimed and the transfer was complete.

_"Congratulations, gentlemen," _Kori told them as she closed the laptop. She and Prima rose from their seats along with the officers. They shook hands all around.

Back up on the sub's deck, night was falling. The sun had set and the velvet darkness of the sea deepened to surround them. An escape hatch opened on the hull just behind the sail and two pairs of crewmen carried out two caskets marked with the international warning symbol for radioactivity. They set the caskets down on the deck, saluted their officers and then returned to the sub's interior. The hatch clanged shut behind them and the lock made a hollow rasp that carried through the steel beneath their feet. Kori went to the caskets and checked the seals. There had been no tampering since they'd been affixed after the material had been removed from Soviet MIRV-6 warheads two decades before, in accordance with SALT-II.

While they'd been aboard the Alfa, the _chiliarchoi _had deployed a small swinging boom with a block and tackle. Now Prima and Kori used it to lift the caskets onto their ship. In a few minutes the transfer was complete. Finally the clones shook hands again with the Russians, who bid them a smooth sailing.

_"I'll contact you in three months," _Kori informed the captain.

The clones flipped across the water to the Miss Artiphys. The Russians loosed the lines and tossed them back onto the hydrofoil. They had almost climbed back to the top of the sail when the MK 15's gun carriage whipped around and the Phalanx opened fire.

Within ten seconds the MK 15's six rotating barrels had fired 750 depleted uranium armor-piercing rounds through the Alfa's titanium pressure hull. A gaping hole showed amidships at the water line, just below the sail where the subs operations section was located. High-torque motors whined as the MK 15's turret jerked aft to target the rear of the sub. Another flickering gout of flames lit the darkness as the gun fired a second burst into the attack sub's engineering section.

The captain was standing atop the sail, screaming in Russian at the Miss Artiphys, as Kori ordered Prima to make her course southeast at flank speed. The "special" engaged the waterjets and brought the reactor to full power. Two minutes later the hydrofoil was skimming across the waves at 90 knots, leaving the crippled sub quickly sinking.

_(Slightly over 103½ mph, since one knot, or nautical mile per hour, equals 1.15078 statute miles per hour. A nautical mile is also one minute, or a sixtieth of a degree, of arc of the circle of the earth's circumference. The British standard of measure, 6,080 feet, differs slightly from international measure, 1,852 meters.) Editor_

"We're still over the continental shelf in about 320 feet of water," the _strategos_ remarked to the "special" as they watched the _chiliarchoi_ reloading the Phalanx and stowing the plutonium, "and in a few months, we'll salvage what we need from the Alfa. In the meantime, we've covered our tracks. Remember, an ally bought is an enemy for sale," she instructed with neither mirth nor sympathy.

"I find it interesting that they didn't monitor the accounts to verify the transfer of funds," Prima remarked.

"They'd only have received a transmission from the Miss Artiphys," Kori informed her. "At no time was this computer ever in contact with any bank," she said, patting the laptop. The "special" nodded in understanding and the _strategos _pointed out that, "I doubt they informed anyone of this clandestine rendezvous, and the first burst destroyed their control room an' transmitters. When they're finally missed, they'll have disappeared without a trace," she shrugged, "just more lost mariners hundreds of miles from where they were supposed to be. This should be a good lesson in the wages of greed."

Prima nodded again and checked the GPS to confirm their heading.

"Remain on course and then turn due south and run down the 60ºW meridian all the way to the Windward Islands. We'll turn west to pass between St. Lucia and St. Vincent," Kori instructed. "We're movin' fast enough that the DEA might find us interesting if we sailed further west or north into US waters. They've got some hydrofoil boats that can do 40 knots. We can easily outrun 'em, but why bother? We'd still need to turn south to make Panama anyway."

Three days would see them through the canal and in the Pacific headed for Yokohama. For a moment, the Destroyer of Nations reflected on how easily she'd reverted to the ways of a pirate after a lapse of 2080 years. Everything was different in the modern world, but some things never changed. The thought brought the ghost of a smile to her lips. A conqueror still had to clean up after herself.

_**October 14, 2005 - Yokohama-Kanazawa, Japan**_

In a comfortable lounge at the Mitsubishi Advanced Technology Research Center, Dr. Eric Drexler was meeting with his esteemed guest, Kori Polemos of the CIA. She had made his "dream lab" a reality just over three years ago, and with his team, he'd worked there feverishly ever since. They'd only been at the Mitsubishi lab for a little over a year when the December 2003 news of the Beijing epidemic had shocked them to even greater efforts. Unlike the September of 2002 plagues that had struck the Sudan and North Korea, the Chinese plague had been an engineered strain of influenza rather than small pox.**** The horror of 27.5 million dead had confirmed the claims that Kori had made to him back at his home in California. Since that time, he'd never doubted that his life was endangered or that he owed his continued existance to the beautiful CIA agent.

Ironically he was now in the best possible situation for someone of his abilities. The last three years of work in the lab had been fruitful. Eric Drexler had watched as his theories and research became realities in the hands of a gifted support staff. It was the most talented group he'd ever worked with, and they had grown together into a family, united by their devotion to his vision. Never had he witnessed progress move so quickly, nor had he worked in so well funded an institution. At every turn, his requests for materials and equipment had been granted. Upgrades to the lab had appeared without the administrative entanglements he'd become used to in American academe. Still, he was never frivolous, for he wasn't greedy or whimsical by nature. Kori could never mention to him that by mid-2005, the net worth of the DON GROUP was close to 80 billion US dollars, sufficient to finance anything he could imagine.

The doctor was astonished, thankful, and filled with more hope than at any time in his life. His work had never been more inspired either. In three years his team had achieved practical advances that he'd once consigned to the next two decades. His nanobots could heal the body of most infectious agents, hasten wound repair, prolong life by counteracting the mechanisms of aging, and could be created for specific purposes more rapidly than had ever been thought possible. At one point he had toyed with a personal project long in the theoretical state. Self-replicating nanobots that rapidly "bred themselves" into colonies that could break down damaging oil slicks, or more dangerous petrochemical spills, into their component elements...mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and traces of sulfur. As always, Kori had supported and encouraged his work.

Had the research not been conducted under the tightest security, the lab would have published a stream of scientific articles and probably won several Nobel Prizes. Yet Dr. Drexler didn't miss the renown of the scientific community. They had stymied him, conducted pointless attacks and tedious discussions, and hampered the advancement of knowledge through politics and subterfuge. His work was being done for the benefit of mankind and for the purest of reasons. As Kori had once said of the lab, _"It was created for this one purpose...to do nothing less than save the world."_

Despite maintaining a busy schedule that he could only imagine the details of, Kori had managed to visit the lab on a handful of occasions. At those times, she never failed to greet him and ask about his progress. She seemed to have a good grasp of his work, though she wasn't a scientist herself, and she always asked about his plans and hopes for his research. The CIA agent was always deferential and helpful, taking notes during their talks and telling him that, "_I'll expedite this if possible, doctor_._"_

On a couple of those visits, she'd requested samples of the lab's products for her superiors. In April of 2004 she'd requested nanobots that could remove the lipid plaques that led to arteriosclerosis. Late in the month this past July, she'd been back for a dozen doses of the nanobots that would protect against infection and hasten the healing of wounds. She'd hinted at a covert mission into the USAMRIID facility itself, and had wanted to protect the agents. In each case, Dr. Drexler had been only too happy to comply. Now it was mid-October and she was paying him another visit. This time she was requesting a larger quantity of his nanobots.

"Dr. Drexler, I can only tell you that my superiors are forming a special tactical squad in response to the developing situations as they see 'em," Kori told him apologetically, "and as usual the details are highly classified. I don't know the complete parameters since they're on a 'need to know' basis." She sighed and gave him a conspiratorial smile. "I've been asked to obtain from you, nanobots capable of providing infection resistance and rapid healing, in sufficient quantities to inoculate eighty troops. I have also been asked to request that you prepare the same serum in a quantity sufficient for 7,950 doses, and provide a quantity of the infectious agents sufficient for field testing the nanobots in primate subjects."

"How long do I have to prepare the larger quantity?" Drexler asked. "I have sufficient material for the 80 doses now, and of course I have the infectious agents, but it'll take me a month to prepare enough for 7,950 inoculations." He gave her a worried look.

"According to the timetable I was given, the larger quantity isn't required for about six weeks, so there's no problem there, Eric," Kori told him with a smile. It wasn't as though she hadn't already known what his capabilities and inventory were. "I'll take the material for inoculating the 80 troops and the infectious agents for testing with me now, and we'll arrange a timetable for transportin' the larger quantity later." He nodded in agreement.

"I'll have a technician prepare the material for transport," he told her, "standard chilled casing for the nanobots, and a cryogenic biohazard capsule for the infectious agents." He shivered involuntarily and she nodded grimly in sympathetic agreement. Enhanced and reengineered strains of small pox, Ebola, and influenza, all quick acting and highly lethal.

"Those bugs give me the creeps too," she told him. "Now, how about some lunch?"

At that same moment, in Slip C271-A at the Mitsubishi Refitting Dock, Prima was moving through a checklist. She was standing in an observation room six stories above the floor of the dry dock. Below her, stretching more than a football field in length, lay the completed Argo. The cylindrical, black, pressure hull was tapered to a pointed stern while the bow was smoothly rounded. The low conning tower, or "sail", was flared seamlessly into the hull at its base, and quickly tapered into a laterally flattened cross-section much like a teardrop lying on its side. It was located further forward than in most submarines and would hide in the bow wake when the boat was moving underwater, adding almost no hydrodynamic drag of its own.

Prima noted the next test and grasped the handle of a joystick. By moving the handle, she could put the articulated bow planes through a "range of movement" drill. Below the sail, a pair of streamlined fins extended from the hull and tilted through an arc of 180º up and down. Finally, they swung back into the hull leaving no trace of their presence. With a flip of a switch, the joystick put the stern planes through a similar exercise. Next, Prima moved to a console and tested the articulation of the rudder. Last, she used the console to execute a series of commands that caused a narrow rail to rise along the sub's spine. The rear disappeared into a bay in the aft hull, while the front was elevated to clear the top of the sail. The rail was 300 feet long and two feet wide. It was composed of alternating electromagnets and insulators sandwiched down the length of a non-conductive support beam. The rail's elevation was actuated by a hydraulic cylinder, which was hinged to the hull just behind the sail. Prima returned the rail to its hidden rest position and checked off the final boxes on her list.

The past few days had seen the finalization of construction, the loading of stores and provisions, and the shipping of the arsenal. Today the Argo was ready for the _strategos_.

Not far from the refitting dock, a vacant warehouse hosted 88 warriors. All of them were dressed in identical black woven armor, and all of them looked exactly the same. The eight _chiliarchoi _were instructing the eighty _hecatontarches_. Following their downloads, the lieutenants were receiving their tactical information from the Destroyer's captains. A short time later the warehouse rang with the clash of swords, and later still, with the staccato of small arms fire. For a full day the clones practiced both practical drills and theoretical strategy. They absorbed the skills, goals, and philosophy of their general. In another five months the main body of the Destroyer's force would be ready to take arms. They would come into the world as part of an established command structure and join a campaign already in progress. They would provide the numbers their _strategos hypatos _needed to bring down the army of a goddess.

That evening, as the drills ended, the Hellene's Bane surveyed her officer corps. Eighty-eight clones, identical to each other and to herself, stood in their uniforms bearing the arms that had been created for them, _xiphos, xiphidion, _Combined Chakram, and the cartridgeless assault rifles and sidearms She felt what could have been called pride, seeing their ranks drawn up in rows of ten, standing two paces behind each of her eight captains.

Beside her, Prima carried a refrigerated case in one hand, a satchel with an injector in the other. Xena made a series of hand signals to her _chiliarchoi. _They in turn passed the orders to the lieutenants. As they filed past, Prima administered an inoculation to each of the _hecatontarches_, an injection of nanobots that would confer immunity from infection and rapid healing. It was the same inoculation that each of the captains, Prima, and the _strategos_ had received last July.

When the injections were finished, Xena led her troops to the refitting dock where they took up their berths in the Argo. She spoke with the eight captains, refining their orders.

"Run silent, run deep," she told the Argo's acting captain, "and maintain the timetable."

Then she and Prima returned to the Miss Artiphys. Both ships would sail just before dawn following morning. When they put to sea, they would comprise a nation without territory, a force without recognition, and a nuclear power without a limitation treaty between itself and any other government in the world.

The Destroyer of Nations calculated that Dr. Drexler's delivery of nanobot serum would reach the mirror site on December 2nd. It would be delivered to the waiting Secunda, who would administer it immediately to the near full-term clones while still _in vitro_. Her army would be "born" with protection from the biological horrors she or Athena would unleash, and blessed with the ability to survive potentially fatal battle wounds. Their systems would have a few days to assimilate those benefits before she opened the war.

_**December 3, 2005 - An Undisclosed Location in Washington, D.C.**_

**Washington, D.C.** - The Pentagon announced today that it has deployed the first delivery of production Mach 5 cruise missiles at the Mountain Home, ID, Dyess, TX, Ellsworth SD, and Whitman, MO, Air Force Bases. About 100 of the new M5JSAM weapons will be available for delivery by B-1B and B2 bombers. A second delivery of 100 missiles is slated for March 2006.

**Moscow** - Russian health officials have reported the outbreak of an influenza epidemic with symptoms similar to those observed during the outbreak in the Beijing area in December of 2003. Cases have appeared throughout European Russia, from St. Petersburg to Volgograd, and as far east as Yekaterinburg. Isolated cases have also been diagnosed in Minsk, the capitol of Belarus, and Kiev in the Ukraine. Readers will recall that the epidemic in China killed 27.5 million people and raged for almost a year. Pockets of infection are still active in China two years later. The current outbreaks have the potential to spread into Western Europe through the affected nations' ties with the European Union. Dr. Janice Ward of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Ga. said that, "It is almost a certainty that the disease has already been carried outside the affected areas by air passengers. A death toll of 50 million would not be beyond belief." The United States, Canada, and Mexico have suspended all flights to and from Europe until further notice, and have quarantined cargo and ships that have docked at European ports in the last two weeks.

In his office at Omega Sector headquarters, Harry Tasker folded the Washington Post and set it aside. He accessed a State Department database and checked for diplomatic missions to Moscow, Minsk, and Kiev within the last couple of weeks. The agent's search didn't take long. Sure enough, a group of international trade law liaisons and their support staff had toured the ex-Soviet republics just the previous week. It had been a relatively low-level mission aimed at assessing the status of the International Tariff Equalization Treaty implementation between America and the European Union. The republics had been the final stops on the trip and the liaisons had returned to Washington. The mission hadn't received any significant press. Harry recalled that the Chinese epidemic had followed close on the heels of negotiations between the Chinese and Americans over the then pending Most Favored Nation trading status.

There was little doubt in the agent's mind as to who was responsible. Surely Athena's agents in the government had orchestrated the dispersal of biological weapons of mass destruction. Harry had realized for some time that Xena's enemy had been conditioning the world for her eventual overt bid for supremacy. He wondered what the Destroyer of Nations was doing, and when she would retaliate. He wondered where she was.

As he sat wondering, his ear caught a news report on WWDC radio. A 3-alarm fire had broken out in a building only a few blocks away. It was another aging commercial structure near the FBI building, a neighborhood he knew well. His sharp mind realized that for such a dilapidated building to burn vigorously enough to result in 3 alarms, it was probably arson with accelerants involved. It wasn't surprising. An owner was torching his property to collect the fire insurance. It happened a couple times a month in Washington. He turned off the radio. He had more serious things to think about.

Prima and the Destroyer of Nations sat in the step van and watched as three ladder companies responded to the blaze that they'd set on the ground floor of 1005 E St., NW. The _strategos_ could think of few better ways to disguise the significance of a sensitive site than to render it a pile of rubble. Streams of water jetted from a half-dozen hoses as firemen attempted to control the blaze and protect the adjacent structures. Unfortunately, the fire had moved far too fast for their efforts to do any good. It had been planned that way. Even the gawkers standing at the curbs up the block could see that the building was already fully involved. Overhead, a billowing cloud of black smoke roiled into the sky. Something shifted in the facade as if the masonry walls had coughed. A creaking protest increased to a hellish screech from overstrained timbers as the fire weakened ceiling beams and flooring joists finally gave way. The two clones saw the roof of the three story building collapse into the gutted structure as gouts of flame leaped out the windows.

In the rear of the van sat a refrigerated hermetic case with activated bioseals. It contained microbial agents derived from the samples they'd gotten from Dr. Drexler seven weeks before in Japan. Over the intervening time, they'd amplified the microbes, farming the deadly germ strains to produce strategically viable quantities for warfare. They now had enough for scores of weapons. When they'd finished, they'd torched the building to destroy the evidence of their work.

The day before, they'd delivered the 7,951 doses of nanobot serum to Secunda. The "special" had been inoculated by Prima, and had received her orders from the _strategos._ The guardian would still be busy injecting the nearly mature army of clones. Xena expected the process to take two full days; even moving at the speed a "special" was capable of. By tomorrow night, her army would be protected. She almost felt tempted to allow herself a grin. With a resounding crash, the front wall of the building collapsed.

**Continued in Chapter 6**

64


	6. Clonefic Part 3 Chapter 6

Clonefic

Part 3 Chapter 6

By Phantom Bard

**For Disclaimer**: See Part 3 Chapter 1

_I've been workin' on the railroad,  
All the live long day.  
I've been workin' on the railroad,  
Just to pass the time away.  
Don't you hear the whistle blowing?  
Rise up so early in the morn.  
Don't you hear the captain shouting  
"Dinah, blow your horn?"_

**_(First verse of, _"I've Been Working on the Railroad",_ ©1936, by Calumet Music Co)_**

_**December 6, 2005 - Amtrak Atlantic Ave. Station, Boston, Ma.**_

How does an army of two set out to cripple the world's most powerful nation? In 58 BC, Xena and Gabrielle had gone to war against the Roman Republic of Julius Caesar. At that time, their goal was to rescue Eve, and that goal didn't require them to topple the western world's most powerful state. Still, they'd spent a dozen years at war, used every tactic they knew, and slaughtered over 86,000. In the 21st century, cloned Xena and Prima began their war against their divine enemy by attacking her patron state. Their first objective was to undermine the technological and military might of the United States. It was the same goal the Islamists had held, but they'd had neither the Destroyer of Nations' abilities nor her experience. They'd lacked the resources that the DON GROUP's now $108 billion could provide, and they'd never had the Blessing of their god. Where all of America's enemies had failed, she would succeed. Removing the USA as a power base for Athena was Xena's first goal. Her second goal was the nullification of nations that could become secondary threats, a strategy she shared with her enemy. Her final goal was the utter defeat and elimination of the Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare.

The Hellene's Bane had four months before her army was mature. During that time she was free to act anonymously, to strike without warning, and to capitalize on the advantage conferred by her paucity of troops...the advantage of surprise. Unlike an army, two could hide in plain sight.

At 6:00am Prima stood beside a departure monitor and looked at the milling rush hour throng moving around her. Commuters and travelers hurried past like a disorganized school of sardines. She was the barracuda. She regarded their frenetic activity with a cold disregard, feeling no connection to them on any level. They were not near-self and they were not her sisters. To the "special", they moved as if in slow motion. She found their lack of intuitive survival awareness even more appalling. They rushed right past death incarnate without the slightest clue to her presence.

A woman holding a cell phone crushed against the side of her head nearly slammed into the clone as she blabbered and strode towards a departure gate. Prima's eyes flicked to the name badge hanging from the woman's jacket; Spittoonia May, Mass. Dept. of Health it said. Another foot closer and Prima would have snapped her neck in a blur of movement too quick to see, but the woman barely saved herself. After jerking to a halt with a gasp, she stood well within the clone's personal space. Her eyes traveled up Prima's form to meet her face with a sheepish expression. The glacial blue of a killer's calculating attention met her caffeinated brown and made her blanch. The clone's glare was so inhumanly cold that the woman gulped, stuttered an apology, and fled from her in abject terror.

The "special" discreetly reached into her jacket pocket and extracted an aerosol can the size of a "D" cell battery. She scanned the area for anyone that might be paying her too much attention, but they were all too self-absorbed. After seeing no one observing her actions, she twisted the cap and placed the can atop the departure monitor. Almost immediately, a soft puff of vapor issued from the six pinholes around the circumference of the can's cap and swirled off on the currents of air. It would spritz the surrounding space once every two minutes until it was empty...about three hours hence, dispensing a melange of influenza, small pox variola major, and Ebola Zaire. Over that period of time, thousands of people would pass by the place Prima had chosen as the first infection source for the plague that Xena had directed her to spread.

She took a last look around, saw the second puff of germ-laden air expelled from the can, and walked briskly to departure gate 2S. The "special" had a southbound Acela Express to catch. Her next stop would be Penn Station in New York City, and then on to the 30th St Station in Philadelphia. At each stop, she would leave a can of engineered microbes, though the other two would have time delays that wouldn't actuate until 4:45pm, when the evening rush hour crowds were getting thick. At each stop she would have to wait for the next train out, but she had almost twelve hours to travel the six hours of actual train time. Finally she would reach Washington D.C. to meet the Destroyer.

Xena had started out the night before in Miami. She'd boarded the northbound Amtrak Silver Service/Palmetto after placing her first can of microbes in the station at 37th Ave. Her next stop had been the Sligh Blvd. station in Orlando. She left a third can in Savannah, Ga., but somehow, when the conductor announced the stops for Denmark, Columbia, and Camden in South Carolina, the Destroyer of Nations didn't leave her seat. Instead she cursed the Amtrak routing that had denied her Atlanta, Ga. as a target, and didn't leave the train until she reached Raleigh, NC. She left a final can puffing out germs in Richmond, Va., boarded the next Amtrak Regional train, and went to the club car for a Coke. By the time she reached Washington's Union Station, she had missed the evening rush hour in the Capitol City. A cab brought her to the Gangplank Marina at 8:30pm. Prima was already waiting for her.

"You're ahead of schedule, _Strategos,_" Prima dispassionately observed. Xena only grunted in response before going below. She was over three hours early.

The clone tossed her briefcase onto the bench in her cabin. She calculated that there were less than eight hours before her war began in earnest and the casualties started streaming into hospitals up and down the eastern seaboard. The people who were infected first at the train stations would fan out to their destinations and spread the plague. The Destroyer of Nations had no problem with that. Like Athena, she was preparing the battlefield.

Unlike Athena, who had spread her initial military actions across three years in hopes of remaining undetected, Xena could only gain by striking quickly and with ferocity while still unknown. The element of surprise was a strategic advantage that she intended to milk for all it was worth. Once she openly declared herself and her army took the field, she could never regain her anonymity. After a change of clothes, she went back up and rejoined Prima on the bridge. She needed some time alone to think.

The two clones readied the Miss Artiphys and cleared her moorings. This time, as the ship made its way down the Potomac, Xena piloted the hydrofoil personally. She dismissed Prima and stood at the wheel looking up at the stars. Despite the impending destruction she'd unleashed, the thing that bothered her most was the canisters that had remained unused. Surely her deviation from the plan wouldn't save anyone as the epidemic spread. She could find no reason for why she'd spared those three cities, giving Columbia a breathing space of a couple hundred miles. It might translate into only a day's grace. She told herself that in the long run, it would make no difference at all.

_**"Capture brings one to the heart of the enemy."**_

The Destroyer of Nations

_**December 18, 2005 - Somewhere in the North Atlantic**_

Things had been growing quieter for the last nine days. The Hellene's Bane sat at a desk in a cabin aboard CVN-75, the USS Harry Truman. The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier was the centerpiece of carrier group five, which was patrolling the north Atlantic, a thousand miles east of Maine. Across the room, Prima was inputting files on the laptop, having received it back after a through examination by the onboard intelligence officers. The two clones had been aboard since December 9th, after the USS Kauffman, a frigate patrolling the carrier group's perimeter, had approached the Miss Artiphys and noticed the Phalanx. The Destroyer of Nations had been amazed that they'd been able to shadow the naval vessels for almost two days before being approached and taken into custody. It seemed that becoming a prisoner was only difficult when it was a tactical ploy.

On the evening of the 9th, the frigate had edged closer and closer, probably only intending to warn them away from the carrier group at first. Xena had watched them and tapped her foot on the bridge deck in exasperation. Finally, at a quarter-mile's distance, the ship had turned broadside to them, allowing it to bring its 5-inch guns to bear, and had demanded that they hold their position. Prima had complied and they had waited. At last someone on watch had noticed the domed gun carriage of the MK 15 Phalanx system and become curious.

After fifteen minutes, a motor launch had delivered a junior grade lieutenant and a dozen MPs to the Miss Artiphys. They were jumpy, not knowing what to expect. First they'd noted that the Phalanx was loaded and looked operational. Then they'd demanded to be allowed to inspect the ship. Though they were in international waters, Prima had just shrugged and stood aside, as per the _strategos'_ orders. The LTJG had left four MPs to guard the two clones after restricting them to the cabin. The men stood with their fingers on the triggers of their M16A2 rifles, nervously breathing the cabin's microbe tainted air. The officer and his remaining men searched the hydrofoil thoroughly. They found no contraband. They found no dead bodies. They found no hidden terrorists. They too breathed the infected ship's air as they examined the reactor, the advanced high-pressure waterjet propulsion system, and the ship's electronics that were as sophisticated as their own. Finally they'd made their report and been ordered to pilot the ship to the waiting carrier group and deliver its crew to the USS Harry Truman for interrogation.

Aboard the carrier two hours later, the clones had been confined under guard in a cabin. They were made comfortable while inspectors and US Navy intelligence officers went over the Miss Artiphys again with a fine toothed comb. In all, a total of 47 naval personnel went aboard the hydrofoil at one time or another. They were more than enough to ensure that the plague spread throughout the massive ship. Because the emergencies in the US and their unusual prisoners demanded radio silence on intelligence matters, a limited exchange of intelligence officers to brief the other captains in person spread the plagues throughout the task force. The security detail had returned to the USS Kauffman.

Eventually both the Harry Truman's captain and the rear admiral in charge of the carrier group met with the clones. After three days and six meetings, Xena and Prima slowly began to tell them lies that sounded like what they wanted to hear. On the fourth day, neither officer arrived at their cabin, and Xena had remarked to Prima that both had been flushed and concentrating poorly the day before. Two days later, the commanding officers and their closest subordinates had been dead of Ebola.

Panic had broken out on the aircraft carrier. The clones were confined and shunned. Having come from the mainland, from which horrific intelligence reports of epidemics had been received, they were regarded as the obvious disease vectors. Only the medical corps questioned why they were still alive and uninfected. Since the deaths of the captain and the admiral, Xena and Prima had seen almost no one, had spoken with almost no one, and had remained alert to the increasing silence on the ship.

"_Strategos_, it is 0900 hours on the eighteenth. Projections show that 94% of the crew should have succumbed by now," Prima reported as she closed the laptop.

With a crew of 3,200 and an air wing of 2,480, the projected casualties numbered 5,340.

Without answering, Xena rose to her feet. She crossed the cabin, from the desk to the door and with a hard flying sidekick, sent it crashing off its hinges into the passageway outside. The single Marine guard spun from his station beside the door to face her. His presence confirmed Prima's assessment. The last time the clone had caught a glimpse outside, there had been three sentries, one to each side of the door and one across the hall.

The Marine began to raise his rifle, but Xena was prepared for the encounter and she had the element of surprise. The Destroyer of Nations whipped her left arm out, the hand clenched flat, the thumb tucked tightly against her palm. She caught him squarely in the throat with the ridge of the knuckle at the base of her index finger, and his trachea collapsed with a sharp crunch. She snatched the rifle by the barrel and wrenched it from his grasp as he fell. Prima was already at her back carrying the computer. The "special" stooped and retrieved the guard's sidearm and spare magazines.

They headed upwards, making their way through deserted hallways, empty stairwells, and vacated spaces. The few remaining officers and crew were expected to be on the bridge, in operations, or below in engineering. Their first stop was Operations, the nerve center of the carrier. During the entire trip, they only shot one sailor, an engineer's mate who looked more lost than they were and had tried to flee.

In the passageway outside of Operations, they heard only a few voices. The large room was grossly understaffed. The acting Chief of Operations was busy receiving reports from the acting Communications Officer. He was standing beside a ship to ship transceiver with one hand over his face, wiping sweat from his brow. The man was obviously sick. Their news wasn't good. As the clones listened, a crackling transmission came through from a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser. It was reporting massive numbers of crewmen going down with a deadly flu. Only 7 of their 24 officers and 51 of their 340 enlisted men were healthy. The next status report was from a Burke-class destroyer. 276 of DDG-55, the USS Stout's, 323 personnel were infected or already dead, and the ship was being commanded by an ensign. A second destroyer, the USS Cole, DDG-67, failed to answer its hail. The USS Kauffman reported in next. The Perry-class frigate normally carried a crew of 300. It was the ship that had first encountered the Miss Artiphys, and it had led the epidemiological evolution. What the USS Harry Truman's Com received was a "mayday" distress call from a dying man, a young cook's mate who'd wandered into operations and managed to get the radio to work.

"Sir, there are only a dozen of us left...no officers at all...and we're all sick over here," the panicky voice from the Kauffman warned. "We're a death ship, god save us. Stay away, sir. Don't try to come aboard. I'm scared, sir...we're doomed."

"We're sick over here too, son," the Chief said in a soothing voice before breaking into a fit of coughing, "and we've been unable to contact anyone in Washington or Norfolk for a week. They're sick too. Stay in contact as long as you can. It feels like the end of the world."

The Chief turned away from the Com and was violently ill, gagging and heaving up a vomitus that looked like coffee grounds. He was bleeding out from Ebola. The Communications Officer rose to steady him when he staggered and then froze as Prima stepped into the doorway and shot the Chief in the head. She shot the Communications Officer next, and then the other six crewmen who were just beginning to react. Against her speed, they never had a chance. Eight shots...eight dead in just under three seconds.

"Capture brings one to the heart of the enemy," Xena whispered softly, "their ever vulnerable heart." It was a ploy that she'd used many times in her original life.

Xena wandered over to an animated chart screen set in an island in the center of the room. It showed surface and submerged objects across most of the Atlantic. Among the blips were the "friendly" blue dots representing the carrier group centered on the USS George Washington, CNV-73, and the red dots of the Russian North Atlantic Fleet off the Iceland coast. Both were moving towards the USS Harry Truman, the blue dots at what appeared to be flank speed, the red dots at a conservative and inquisitive 6 knots. She nodded to herself and made a hand sign to the "special". Without a second look, she followed Prima out of Operations and headed for the Flag Bridge.

Five stories above the flight deck, the clones entered the admiral's bridge. It was deserted. The Destroyer of Nations looked down out a window and saw bodies littering the 4½ acres of asphalt below. Most of them were flight deck crew, wearing yellow, red, brown, purple, and blue vests, color-coded to their duties. Only a few were feebly moving. Equipment sat abandoned on the deck like a bored child's forgotten toys.

On the next level up, Xena shot two officers in the ship's bridge, the acting Officer of the Watch, and a Marine captain. On the seventh and top level, they found Air Control empty. There was no one left to fly, no one to operate the catapults, and no one to prep the planes. It might take another day or two for the remaining crewmembers to succumb completely, and before that time, the USS George Washington's carrier group would arrive. After a week of remaining on station and overhearing a few hundred panicked radio transmissions, the Russians would approach for a look. Both would start their investigations with the carrier. Within a month at most, they would all be dead. Their battle readiness would falter long before that.

Beyond those nearby ships, both navies were crippled by epidemics at home. Neither the Americans nor the Russians wanted to deploy ships and then find their crews dying at sea from diseases contracted in port. Any other naval vessels already on the high seas were patrolling the Pacific or Indian Oceans, and were not a threat at present.

"Prima, go forward and set two canisters on different levels in the berthing spaces, then meet me in the magazine," Xena ordered. "We'll make this the mother of all plague ships."

The "special" removed the lower casing from the laptop and extracted four "D" cell sized aerosol cans. She handed two to the _strategos_, then nodded and quickly headed back towards the forward stairs. Xena reassembled the laptop and headed toward the aft stairwell. Her two canisters would be placed in the engine room and the passageway to the main hanger. All four would create a reservoir of microbes; virulent, concentrated, and located so far below the weather deck that they would be slow to disperse. It would be Xena's final surprise aboard the USS Harry Truman.

A short time later, when Prima reached the ship's magazine, she found the _strategos_ taking an inventory. Among the conventional and guided munitions for the aircraft wing, there were also a dozen Mark-28 strategic weapons configured for aerial delivery.

"Let's make ready to transfer these to the Miss Artiphys," Xena said. Acquiring them was the second goal of her strategy involving the carrier group.

An hour later, the two clones had made their way to the waterline after hauling the Miss Artiphys abreast of the Harry Truman's open stern. A loading crane there lowered the dozen Mk-28s through the forward hatch in the hydrofoil so they could be stowed below deck. It was slow work with only the two clones, but they proceeded methodically and without interruption. When the weapons were finally secured, the clones cast off from the carrier. Once aboard their own vessel, they stood off from the doomed Harry Truman with the channel motor and set a course of 112º that would place them at the Strait of Gibraltar in just over two days.

"Bring us to flank speed," the Destroyer of Nations ordered.

As always, Prima obeyed in the blink of an eye. The hydrofoil came onto its new heading and began its acceleration to 90 knots. It wasn't yet 1500 hours, but they'd already had a busy day. In their wake, 7,000 sailors lay dead or dying. With the arrival of the second carrier group and the Russian fleet, that number would eventually climb to around 24,000. Xena wasn't sure of the exact compliment of the Russian ships' crews, but that wasn't important. What was important was that no major power would control the Atlantic for some time to come. Equally important, the Hellene's Bane had acquired a dozen hydrogen bombs and procured a troop transport. As she stood gazing ahead across the miles of open ocean, she indulged in neither malicious celebration nor maudlin self-recrimination. She felt no guilt, only accomplishment and purpose. She was already refining her New Year's plans for the Mediterranean.

_**Come** to me when winter's snow lies thick upon the ground,_

_Cloaking all the world in white and shrouding every sound._

_Then gift me with a peace so still, all's frozen as in death,_

_And the only hint of living is the billow of my breath._

_(Opening stanza of verse 4 from _"The Lay of the Conqueror", _author unknown, circa 42 BC)_

_**December 30, 2005 - USAMRIID, Ft. Detrick, Maryland**_

0415 EST came with three hours of darkness still remaining on a chilly winter morning. At the main gate of Ft. Detrick, a pair of sentries sat in a small guardhouse watching the views from surveillance cameras on a bank of black and white monitors. One of them rubbed cold-stiffened hands, sipped lukewarm coffee, and slipped his US Army issue lined gloves back on. His duty shift had begun at 2200 hours the previous night. Now, after over six hours, he wasn't as alert as he'd been earlier. The chill sapped his energy, the boredom sapped his concentration, and the last vehicle to approach USAMRIID's main gate had come in at 2340 hours, over four-and-a-half hours ago. Guard duty didn't get much duller than this.

"I'm going to step out for thirty," he said to his partner who was sitting with heavy eyelids at the console next to him. She grunted and nodded absently, then shook herself and drank from her own coffee cup.

Outside the guardhouse the air was bracing. A newly fallen foot of snow carpeted the wide parade ground and softened the silhouettes of the nearby trees. In the near distance, the massive USAMRIID building squatted with its air scrubber vent stacks pointing from the roof up into the sky. The cold slapped him awake in an instant, and he looked overhead at the crystalline night, admiring the sharpness of the stars. It was so different from the ever-present glow of the city he'd grown up in, but then, he'd never seen snow in Miami either. Here, just across US-15 from Fredrick, Maryland, and only 40 miles from the US Capitol, the sky was wide above the trees, dark as velvet, and speckled with twinkling points of light. One of those points, he noticed, was moving. Could it be a falling star? A satellite in orbit? He watched as it seemed to trace an arc from east to west, its speed ever increasing, its brightness growing fast.

By the time he realized that something was very wrong it was far too late. Perhaps the first real clue was the shattering series of sonic booms, which came one after another like the reports from a howitzer battery, and reverberated back from the nearby foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. He'd never heard anything like it. In what seemed like an instant, the star was falling on the base. It struck its target with devastating accuracy.

The scramjet cruise missile slammed into the containment labs at Mach 8, almost 6,000 mph. Its mass was a scant 300lbs and there was no warhead. There was no explosion. The inertia from the impact alone shattered buildings for two hundred yards in all directions. Most of the high value USAMRIID technical facilities were destroyed in an instant. All the positive pressure containment labs, the microbe isolation storage, the biological agent weaponizing factory, and the medical research areas disappeared in a cloud of debris and dust that rose a half-mile into the night sky and slowly followed the prevailing winds southeast.

By dawn, the first of the microbial fallout had reached the western suburbs of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. By noon, both cities would be enveloped in an unseen pall of death. The US military would be deprived of its biological arsenal, courtesy of the Destroyer of Nations. More importantly, any unprotected scientists, agents, or clones in Athena's strongholds would be infected.

0430 EST hours saw full dark in Hanford, Washington. The local time was 1:30am. In a replay of the events at the USAMRIID facility in Maryland almost 2,200 miles to the east, a falling star slammed into its target. This star had a total mass of 600lbs, a full-size scramjet cruise missile. It carried a warhead weighing 120lbs, composed of 27.5lbs of weapons grade plutonium, the triggering mechanism, and the guidance system. The yield for the warhead was 25 kilotons, rather modest by modern standards.

Hanford, Washington was a small town on the west bank of the Columbia River. In all honesty, it was in the middle of nowhere, east of the Cascade Range and the populous Pacific Coast. The nearest town was Edna, population 349. Still, it was a high value target. Hanford had been a notorious government production facility for weapons grade plutonium. It had been active from 1943, to 1989 when it was closed down, and it had accumulated the nation's largest collection of high level nuclear waste. An eerie, neon blue water pool containing cylinders of radioactive cesium and strontium, the by-products of four-and-a-half decades of nuclear weapons production, was the primary target.

The scramjet cruise missile struck it dead on at 6,000mph. The impact and the blast vaporized the glowing pool, its contents, and another 53 million gallons of deadly radioactive waste stored in shallow-buried, single-walled tanks nearby. Within minutes of the strike, a cloud of high level fallout was headed outwards from an altitude of six miles, and with a volume of almost 300 million gallons. The radioactivity from the bomb itself only served to enrich the ejecta of what was the mother of all dirty bombs. Within five hours the cloud would reach Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, and Boise. In ten hours, Salt Lake City and San Francisco would be sterilized. In two days, the fallout would spread south to Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix, and Las Vegas. The Air Force Bases at Ellsworth, Mountain Home, Dyess, and Whitman, would become dead zones. The prevailing winds would carry the radioactivity east, all the way to Chicago, Detroit, and Indianapolis. The projected short-term lethality was on the order of 65 million souls.

432 nautical miles due east of Virginia Beach, at 70º0'0"W X 36º0'0"N, the Argo had surfaced after salvaging the torpedoes and reactor core from the sunken Alfa. The Argo's pilot had set the helm onto a heading of 310º, but held her position steady at station keeping. The _hecatontarches_ had raised the beam along the submarine's spine and elevated it to thirty degrees. In the aft hold that served as a weapons bay, a team of clones had loaded a 600lb Mach 8 cruise missile onto the launch rail. When it was in position, they'd sealed the aft bay doors and prepared for the launch.

By 0400EST the reactor aboard the Argo had charged a battery of capacitors and the fire control officer in the sail triggered the current. The prodigious power stored in the capacitors charged the series of electromagnets in sequence, from the rail's rear to its front, drawing the metal cruise missile down its length and launching it into the night sky. The process took only a few hundredths of a second. The cruise missile left the electromagnetic launcher at 90Gs, and accelerated to Mach 9 within two seconds. After a twenty-eight minute flight at Mach 8, the scramjet with its nuclear fission warhead would slam into the Hanford atomic waste site 2,800 miles away. Ten minutes later, the 300lb half-scale cruise missile was launched towards Ft. Detrick.

The Destroyer of Nations had used an electromagnetic launcher, or rail gun, instead of a solid fuel rocket booster, to accelerate her scramjet to supersonic speed. She had minimized the necessary mass and expense of her weapon system, and reduced the telltale procurement of the sensitive materials required. With the same system, she could launch non-self-propelled projectiles as well. The result was that the Argo was tens of tons lighter and hosted much less explosive material than a conventional submarine. The only drawback was that it took almost a full ten minutes to accumulate the electrical charge necessary to fire a single projectile. In the Destroyer's plans, neither rapid fire nor simultaneous multiple launches were necessary. The Hellene's Bane had opted for an "economical" approach to conquering the world.

At 0415EST, as the first impact demolished the USAMRIID facility, the Argo sank silently into the Atlantic, leaving no trace of its presence. The pilot set a course of 75º, or east-northeast, and brought the Argo to flank speed, 45 knots. The diving officer made the sub's depth 400 feet. In 3 days, 18 hours, and 45 minutes, the Argo would be lying 500 miles off the coast of France, in position to prepare the battlefield of Europe for the coming war. Since the Miss Artiphys' mission earlier in the month, the Atlantic Ocean had been largely unpatrolled, a free zone for those with the means and the will to sail it. The Destroyer's forces had both the means and the will.

_**January 1, 2006 - The Mediterranean, West of Sardinia**_

**Moscow** - After nearly a month, the influenza epidemic that began here and in Kiev and Minsk has claimed an estimated 11.4 million lives in Europe. Within days of the official report, thousands of cases had been diagnosed. The death rate began to accelerate during the second week of December as the epidemic spread through Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania. The next week, Austria, Germany, the Balkan states, and Bulgaria were affected. These countries have now confirmed 4.8 million fatal cases in the last week of 2005. In Brussels, experts are skeptical as to the efficacy of the European Union's control measures. Isolated pockets of cases began showing up in London, Paris, Lyon, Milan, and Bern as early as December 20th. The World Health Organization has refused to make predictions about the eventual death toll. "This could be the start of a worldwide pandemic far worse than what was endured in 1918," said Dr. Bozo Wasascu of the Bucharest Red Cross, last Thursday. The doctor could not be reached for further comment today, and a colleague explained that he had been struck and killed on New Year's Eve by a car whose driver had collapsed at the wheel and died of the flu.

The Miss Artiphys rested at anchor in 14 fathoms of clear blue water, two miles off the Sardinia coast, at the mouth of the Bay of Oristano. It was a travel poster beautiful afternoon, in a travel poster beautiful destination. The hydrofoil lay gently bobbing among other pleasure craft. Her occupants were relaxing on the bridge like any other pair on a vacation. Sunglasses and bikinis had replaced their black uniforms, helping them "blend in" as rich and beautiful American twins enjoying their carefree leisure while the world around them died.

Xena and Prima had been busy over the last two weeks. 50 hours after leaving the Northern Fleet behind, the catamaran had passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and sailed into the Mediterranean Sea. It was a homecoming of sorts, for two souls who had never plied its waters in their present lives. Both remembered their days spent as pirates, ranging from Hispania to the Hellespont, harrying the coasts of Italia, Illyricum, Achaea, Macedonia, Thrace, Ionia, Lydia, and Caria.

But those memories were 2,080 years out of date. The present day Med was a pond, criss-crossed by container ships, fishing vessels, passenger cruisers, and the naval vessels of over a dozen nations. Most ports were so congested that the clones had fought ebb tides to make the docks early enough in the day to claim a berth. The big hydrofoil drew attention as well, being such an uncommon type of craft. Still, the two clones had achieved their mission and maintained their timetable...barely.

They'd made landfall at the ports of call for Athens, Rome, Tel Aviv, and Alexandria. At each stop, they'd succeeded in hiding two Mk-28 warheads. Usually they distributed them, one in the harbor, and the second near the government centers within the city limits. The eight thermonuclear bombs were counting down the seconds until 3:15:44pm, using the local time for Rome. It was a subtle message that Xena intended to send. The time represented a special date. The bombs were synchronized according to the clock in the city where she'd died, on March 15th, 44 BC...the Ides of March in the year that her original self had been crucified.

New Years Day 2006 fell on a Saturday, and by mid-afternoon, no celebratory crowds would be congregating as they might have been near midnight. Only government and military personnel would be carrying on their duties, and the more of them who were killed the better.

"This year'll be remembered as the year of war," Xena said, "the year the past ended. It was fated to be the year of change. It just won't be changin' the way Athena hoped."

"1515 hours, _Strategos_," Prima reported as they stared east towards Sardinia and the sea beyond. They waited in silence.

The closest bombs were in Rome and its port of Ostia, two hundred miles away. In the daylight, they wouldn't even see a flash. The only clue that the detonations had occurred was the radio suddenly crackling and falling into harsh static as the electromagnetic pulse from the blasts shocked the atmosphere and created magnetic fields. Although the effect was minimized, because the explosions were either at ground level or submerged in water rather than occurring in the atmosphere, the local AM radio station in Arborea disappeared. Prima checked the tuner's presets and found nothing being broadcast from any of the stations in Oristano or Terralba either.

The Destroyer of Nations waxed philosophical. "With the epidemic in Europe claiming so many lives, maybe I shoulda' skipped Rome and Athens and attacked Istanbul, Beirut, an' Tunis instead. Seems kinda excessive, like bombin' the dead."

"We'd have no assurance or control over the timetable or the targets affected," Prima commented in response, "and for all we know, Athena's microbes have been engineered to lose virulence in a month. Maybe Athena wanted to spare Rome an' Athens. They were once her cities."

"You're right," the _strategos_ conceded, "and the first lesson is to never second guess a plan after its execution. You can only adapt. If there was a mistake made, then the error was overkill, and that's a lesser flaw than omission."

"No victory comes from an unused weapon, but excess is acceptable in war."

"Exactly. It trains the enemy to despair rather than to expect sloppiness or mercy."

"So do we maintain the timetable, _Strategos_?'

"Yes, Prima. Make our course 255º for the Strait of Gibraltar."

_**January 2, 2006 - Bay of Biscay**_

Europe was reeling as it never had before. Even at the height of the Second World War, the destruction and loss of life had been spread over many months and years. The fear of nuclear war that had traumatized a generation during the Cold War paled before the realities of the raging influenza epidemic and the New Year's Day destruction of Rome, Athens, Tel Aviv, and Alexandria. Throughout the European Union, over 16.2 million lives had been lost to disease. The casualties in the bombed cities hadn't been tallied.

Throughout the Old World, voices were raised in horror, fear, and helpless anguish. No country was unaffected. Every nation quaked as social order decayed. The last month had brought more death than any month of war known to mankind, but for the first time, there was no declared war. There were no enemies, no allies, and no understanding of the hostilities. There were no visible good guys or bad guys and no "sides", only casualties. Most people didn't believe that a war was raging. They saw the epidemic as an act of nature, and the bombs as the work of terrorists. And yet there was war. Those who would have reflexively blamed the Americans could only shudder at the destruction that had been wrought in that country.

Right on time, at 2300 hours GMT, the Argo surfaced outside the Bay of Biscay, five hundred miles off the coast of France. The submarine was positioned at 7º0'0"W X 47º0'0"N, as per the _strategos'_ orders. The trip had taken just shy of four days, and though the time had been short, the crew of clones had been busy. They had fashioned an atomic device, crude but operational, from the reactor core of the sunken Alfa. Its yield on detonation would be greater than any of the remaining three warheads made from the black market Russian plutonium that Xena had bought. The Alfa's high-pressure reactor had provided twenty kilos of enriched uranium, forty-four pounds worth, which had been divided into five sub-critical masses. These would be blasted together by charges derived from a couple of the salvaged torpedoes.

In the sail, one of the _chiliarchoi_ raised the rail of the electromagnetic launcher. Another passed the order to the aft weapons bay, and a crew of _hecatontarches_ readied a scramjet cruise missile for firing.

The first weapon left the rail gun at 2312 hours, followed by three more at ten-minute intervals. Each accelerated to incandescence as it left the launcher at Mach 5.5 and reached its maximum velocity of Mach 9 less than two seconds later. After another ten seconds, as the projectile decelerated toward Mach 7, the scramjet engine ignited and maintained the missile's speed at Mach 8. With that speed, most of the warheads were detonating before the next weapon could be launched.

Berlin disappeared in a fireball at 2324 hours after an eleven-and-a-half-minute flight by the first cruise missile. 2.7 of the 3.4 million innocent people there died in the 25-kiloton blast. Launched at 2322 hours, the second warhead vaporized Brussels at 2330. The third scramjet to be launched struck Paris at 2338 hours, needing only six minutes to reach its target. All three cities had been struck by fission bombs built with Russian plutonium. Like the weapon that had destroyed the Hanford site, these produced a yield equal to 25 kilotons of tri-nitro-toluene. The fourth bomb had been assembled from the enriched uranium gleaned from the Alfa's reactor core, and devastated London at 2348 in a blast of 50 kilotons. England's capitol city had been selected because of that country's close ties to the US and its having been least affected by the European plague. The Destroyer of Nations was "leveling" the playing field in more ways than one.

In each case, there had been so little time between detection of the incoming object and the resulting destruction, that no action beyond confirmation of the target and a first communication with the military command had been possible. The longest flight time had been under twelve minutes, the shortest, just five-and a-half minutes. In no case had there been time for a response. There hadn't even been time to sound the air raid alarms.

As the London bound scramjet screamed into the night sky with air friction bringing it to a red-orange incandescence, the weapons control officer in the sail began retracting the launch rail. The clones in the weapons bay secured the aft hatch. The helm turned the Argo onto a new course of 225º, and the sub moved in a starboard turn at one-quarter speed. Seconds before 2400 hours, or midnight GMT, the Argo submerged.

The communications officer had radioed the Miss Artiphys at 2342, directly following the fourth launch, to report that the action had proceeded on schedule and according to plan. That transmission was received by Xena as the hydrofoil sped past Tangier, to the south of the mouth of the Strait of Gibraltar.

Before the electromagnetic interference from the blasts in Paris and London disrupted radio reception, the _strategos_ replied to the Argo, "Preparation of the European Theater is complete. Proceed as planned."

_**January 6, 2006 - Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee**_

"Daaaaad! How long do we have to stay in this dump? There's dirt all over the ground here. Do you think you coulda' found anyplace more egreeeegiously boring?"

Harry Tasker rolled his eyes at his 21-year old daughter, Dana, who was braying her displeasure with the grating whine of an indignant teen. Across the picnic table, Helen groaned and dropped her face into her hands.

"See, even Mom's like...bored to tears!"

Harry sighed. In the last month, his daughter had lost ten years of maturity and his wife had gained twenty. The agent just felt tired and irritable. He was too worried to be bored, and too scared not to worry. He hated it, but could do almost nothing about it.

"Do you think this is my favorite place in the world?" He snapped at the GW Univ. senior. He still thanked god that she'd been a commuting student living at home. "All the interesting places are full of dead people! You want to join them?"

His eyes bugged out and the veins stood inflated in his neck. Take ten deep breaths, he ordered himself, recalling the anger management courses from his military days. Slowly he calmed down enough to feel thankful that his family had survived the last month. Up and down the eastern seaboard, 31 million others hadn't.

Early on December 7th he'd already been in bed with Helen when Spencer Trilby himself had called the agent at home. It was a first. Harry had jerked awake in response. Trilby had told him that four cases of Ebola had been diagnosed in Miami, a case of small pox and three cases of influenza in Boston, and another of each in Philadelphia. Two cases of influenza and a case of Ebola had just been admitted in Orlando, and New York was hosting two cases of small pox and one of Ebola. Savannah Georgia had just reported a case of influenza and a case of small pox. Omega Sector's computer had made a projection and the data supported a sweeping epidemic of three unrelated diseases moving from both the north and south and slated to converge on Washington. The first cases were expected in the Nation's Capitol around 9:00am. It was already 2:35am, early on Pearl Harbor Day. America had been victimized by another sneak attack, maliciously timed. _Get out,_ Spencer Trilby had told him, _stay away from the cities and await further orders._ Harry Tasker had never heard from Omega Sector again.

By 3:00am he'd been on the road, having hauled his wife from their bed and Dana off the computer and out of a chat room. He'd driven from McLean, Va., speeding around I-495, the Washington Beltway, to I-66, heading west. While Helen and Dana questioned him, he'd done 80mph all the way to the junction with I-81 south. Most of his answers had been, "I don't know. People are dying." His wife had been terrified and his daughter had been angry. After 25 miles he'd turned off onto US-211, heading east for 10 miles, and then pulled into the parking lot of Luray Caverns, 6 miles west of the Shenandoah National Park. It was 4:50am by then. He'd picked the locks on the doors and herded his family underground.

By morning they'd been joined by an increasingly panicked group of locals. The proprietor of the cave had chained the gates of the parking lot, locked the building that contained the entrance elevators, and hung a "closed" sign on the door. The natives of Luray, Virginia didn't want outsiders bringing their diseases to the rural town.

For a week they'd waited, listening to the area radio stations reporting on the spread of the epidemics. Those stations had gone off the air, one by one. By December 14th, the last one had fallen silent. On the 15th, a farmer came down with flu symptoms. It might not have been the plague flu. It might not have been the flu at all, but Harry had no way to tell. He and his family were back on the road a half-hour later.

They continued south on I-81, staying to the west of the cities. After 30 miles, they reached the junction with I-64, the main highway leading west from Richmond. There hadn't been a car in sight. Harry had pressed the gas pedal down harder and kept on going. They drove all day and their single reassurance was that the small towns off the interstate seemed mostly normal. Harry stopped in Fancy Hill, Va., and charged $600 worth of camping supplies and dehydrated food. A hardware store had provided P-100 particle masks and batteries. Though he suspected that he'd never pay the bill, he carefully stashed the receipts out of habit. After that, it was back out onto the highway.

Soon he found that he'd have to make a choice. Knoxville, Tn., sat astride I-81. Beyond it lay Chattanooga and then Atlanta. They'd started to see a few cars on the road when they'd passed through Roanoke, 200 miles north. Now traffic was getting heavier, and as it grew, Harry's nervousness grew along with it. For each vehicle they encountered, his blood pressure went up a point. Finally he couldn't take it any more. He'd turned south onto SR-66, driven 15 miles down US-321, passed through the town of Gatlinburg at 45mph, (though the place looked normal), and driven into the Smokey Mountains National Park. Off the Little River Trail Rd he'd pulled into a campground, parked in an end space, and fallen asleep at the wheel with the doors locked and his sidearm in his lap. When he awoke the next morning, he'd discovered that many others had had the same idea. The campground was over half-filled with cars and RVs, though it was the dead of winter.

Fearing infection, people in the campsites kept to themselves. No one had approached the Taskers that first day, nor on the second. They'd rigged their campsite and tried to make themselves as comfortable as they could, without electricity or running water, in the year end winter's chill. Harry remembered the skills he'd learned as a commando in jungles and hostile places around the world. After his shopping spree in Fancy Hill, he was better equipped than on any mission he could recall. Still, Dana soon began whining, and Helen took on a resigned melancholia. Both were unused to "roughing it", and both missed their home and friends. Without understanding the background info that Harry did, they couldn't understand the gravity of the threat around them. They both expected to pack up and go home any day. The longer it went without that happening, the lower their spirits got.

By the second week of their stay, their tempers were frayed. No one was unaffected. The people camped around them understood even less than they did. They were displaced and terrified refugees, hiding from the epidemics that they'd heard were ravaging the cities along the eastern seaboard. These campers recreated the migrant peasants of England and Europe in 1348 AD, when Yersinia pestis, the Black Plague, had driven them off their productive lands and into wandering lives of starvation, looting, and lynching. They were afflicted with the same ignorance, horror, anger, helplessness, and even superstitions of their predecessors in suffering from 650 years before. The South had never lacked for fire and brimstone preachers, a wrathful god, or predictions of the apocalypse. The Taskers stayed in their tent, hearing shouted arguments in the night, then finally gunshots, screams, and wailing. That was Christmas Eve. Harry had grimly loaded magazines for his HK-53 as Helen and Dana watched with wide, fearful eyes.

Like the world of pre-industrial times, darkness ruled the night. The physical darkness that had followed the death of so many utility workers was mirrored by the psychological darkness of scared people for whom the constraints and order of society were failing. It was the same effect seen in asylums, where "lights out" inaugurates a cacophony of wailing and gibbering as inner delusions replace institutional structure. After the first few nights, the four park rangers took to patrolling the grounds, spotlights stabbing into the dark from their Jeep as they enforced a sundown curfew with rifles. They controlled the worst behavior, and most people stayed in their tents at night.

During the daylight an air of depression and resignation prevailed in the campground. It was dismal. The Taskers felt it like everyone else. Harry, unable to stand the inactivity, finally undertook a project, mostly to preserve his dwindling reservoir of hope. Each day, he spent a couple hours driving the park roads, visiting each campground he came to, and searching for a familiar face.

It was on his sixth foray that he drove through Right Hand Gap on US-441 and crossed the state boundary between Tennessee and South Carolina. He continued along the scenic road, worrying and watching, and hopefully twisting the tuner dial on his radio. Nothing but static came from the speakers. The agent wasn't surprised. The last Knoxville station had gone silent on the 23rd.

Finally he entered an area on the park's South Carolina side, where the park shared a boundary with the Cherokee Indian Reservation. Only a mile from the park boundary he saw the sign for a campground and pulled in.

Driving into the campground was like riding into a paranoid small town in a cheap western movie. Suspicious eyes watched him from the campsites as he rolled past. It had been the same everywhere he went. Everyone was a potential danger; everyone was a stranger. Harry had driven down the first two short roads that had joined the main road from the right. There had been no vehicle and no face that looked familiar in either place.

Back on the campground's main road, Harry took the third turnoff, a left this time. For the first hundred yards it was the same tiresome scenery; muddy cars beside dirty tents, muddy RVs, and suspicious-eyed people, all under a coating of half-melted snow. He passed them with failing interest. Another fifty yards down the road there was a splash of color. A pair of ancient VW mini-buses with a carnival bright awning stretched between them sat parked on either side of a raised BBQ and picnic table. On the ground a slow fire was smoldering beneath an old style iron tripod from which hung a kettle right our of a witch's dream. A heavyset woman was stirring the contents with a long metal rod. She looked up at the sound of Harry's car, and the agent jammed on the brakes when he saw her face. It was Lynn, Ray Fell's significant other, and the co-owner of the Congressional Diner in Columbia.

Harry Tasker leapt out of the door, leaving it hanging open in the middle of the road. With a whoop he crossed the few yards and ran into the campsite. Lynn recognized him only moments before he hoisted her substantial bulk off the ground in a bear hug.

At the sound of his voice, Ray had stepped out of the nearer van with a large revolver in one hand and a machete in the other. The Ph.D. certainly looked capable of murder. In fact, he'd never looked more like Hannibal the Cannibal. He stopped in amazement when he saw who it was and a wide smile spread across his face.

"Harry," he exclaimed, "Harry Tasker! Of all the people I could possibly see out here, you're the last I would've guessed we'd meet. How the hell are you?"

"I'm depressed and angry, but I sure am happy to see you," the agent answered. He took a quick look at the vans and saw Angie peering out a window of one, Allan peeking from behind a curtain in the other. "I see you managed to escape the city. I'm very glad."

"How about Helen and Dana," Lynn asked seriously, "are they with you? She'd checked the car for anyone else and seen that it was empty. She looked worried.

"They're in a campsite at the other end of the park, in Tennessee," Harry said. "They're safe, but depressed and angry."

"Look, Harry, there's plenty of room here," Ray told him, gesturing expansively down the road past their vans. The remaining sites were deserted. "We'd feel much better having you close by, and honestly, it's pretty disturbing around here at night. I don't think I've slept a wink after dark in weeks." He'd tucked the revolver into his waistband and laid the machete on the picnic table. He sighed and said, "I haven't been this on edge since Nam."

"I know what you mean," Harry said, "and I think Helen and Dana would love to have someone else to talk to." He checked his watch. "If I leave now, I can pack up our site and bring them back here. We should be able to set up our camp before dark."

"We'd be glad to help y'all," Angie offered, having stepped out of the van and joined Ray and Lynn. She gave Harry a wide smile.

"Great!" Harry said, answering her smile with one of his own. Then he gave Ray a serious look. "Tonight after we've settled in, I've got some serious stuff to discuss with you. I couldn't have hoped for a better person to ask about some of the things that have occurred to me over the last couple weeks."

"Well, I'll be here," Ray told him, as if he had anywhere else to be, "just go and bring back your family. There's strength in numbers and I'll tell you, frankly, I believe we're the only sane ones in the park."

He still looked so much like Hannibal Lecter, and hearing him speak of sanity in any context struck the agent as humorous. With a wave and a wide smile, Harry Tasker hurried back to his car and swung it around, letting the tires spin on the gravel and slush. On the drive back, he was so happy that he whistled badly all the way and didn't touch the radio once.

Helen and Dana thought he'd cracked when he leapt out of the car and practically danced over to the tent. They were eyeing him nervously until he told them who he'd found. Helen and Dana were barely aware of who Ray, Lynn, Allan, and Angie were. They'd heard of the Congressional Diner, but had never been to it. Harry talked non-stop about it as he stuffed things haphazardly into the car's trunk, finally pulling down the tent and stuffing it into the back seat with their clothes and sleeping bags still inside.

"Never mind," he told them, "you'll like it better than here."

"I'd like anyplace better than here," Dana muttered as they drove off. "I'm sure things always look greener on the other side of the park." Her mother shot her a look.

"So who are these people, dear?" Helen asked.

"Well, I guess you could call them hippies," he told her.

"Daaaad, the last hippie died of a drug overdose in 1974," Dana claimed with absolute certainty, "so, duh, everyone knows that."

Harry spent the trip telling them about their new neighbors. The Taskers had absolutely nothing in common with the uber-hippies except for Xena. Still, after a month without seeing a friendly face, the prospect of having familiar people nearby was more positive than anything that had happened in weeks. It was the first really good turn to come their way since leaving home.

That night, after they'd set up their camp, the Taskers joined the uber-hippies and traded stories. Though they'd all introduced themselves when the Taskers had first arrived, they hadn't had time to get to know each other. Now, with the flickering flames from burning logs lighting their faces and Lynn softly plucking notes on a guitar, they resembled groups of travelers from centuries long past. In the damaged modern world, they reverted to the kind of social activity that had developed through the ages. It grew from the pull of the human instinct to seek out others of their kind, and provided the opportunity to pass on the wisdom that they'd gleaned in their daily struggle to survive. Now, without telephones, TV, radio, or computers, face to face communication reclaimed the place it had enjoyed though all the centuries of human history. The Taskers and the uber-hippies partook of a nighttime ritual that had arisen in a time before humans were truly human.

"We'd heard the reports of rapidly spreading plagues to the north and south," Ray told them, "and I thought it was suspiciously similar to what had happened in other countries around the world. We'd heard about the flu in Russia and Europe, and then there were those epidemics in China, North Korea, and the Sudan a few years ago. All I could think was that if the cities were the centers of infection, then we had to get away. Then Alex Williams showed up on duty wearing a gas mask. That was it. We left."

"You see, before we settled in Columbia, we spent all our time traveling," Lynn told them, gesturing vaguely at the VW mini-buses, "so we just went back out on the road after Alex warned us of the plagues. Anyway, no matter where you are, there's always a campground nearby."

Allan nodded his head in agreement, but said nothing. He eyed the Taskers shyly and only offered a self-conscious smile.

"I always liked travelin'," Angie added, as she popped open a can of Pepsi and dropped the bag of Doritos she'd been holding in her lap, "it reminds me of when Ray an' Lynn found me after I'd run 'way from home."

Sitting next to her at the log, Dana found herself retrieving the bag of Doritos and handing them back to the blonde. Angie gave her one of the wide smiles that came so easily to her.

"Thanks," she said, taking the bag and fumbling the can of soda, "but maybe y'all had better hang onto 'em." She was holding the can tightly in one hand and the bag in the other, and didn't have a free hand left to eat with. "Help yourself if ya want," she offered.

Dana took the chips back and started munching. For some reason, the sometimes-cynical young woman didn't comment on the blonde's clumsiness or the fact that she could have simply set her soda can on the ground at their feet.

"What about Alex and Karen?" Harry asked, since Ray had mentioned the policeman.

"Well, we'd planned to meet here in the park if he ever got away from Columbia," Ray said, "but being a cop..." He trailed off and shrugged.

They both knew that with the responsibilities Alex's job carried, he'd probably be the last to leave, if he didn't end up dead in the line of duty. Columbia was in the midst of its most serious emergency, and with all the social disruption, law enforcement would be critical. After a prolonged silence, Harry continued, relating his side of the story.

"I got a call from my boss warning me of the first cases in Boston, Philly, Miami, and Orlando," Harry said, "and I was ordered to leave town."

"It was terrifying," Helen added, "and they thought the diseases were going to be coming to Washington in a few hours. We drove away from the city and spent the next week hiding in Luray Caverns...until someone there got sick. Then we came here."

"Harry, what does your boss think is going on," Ray asked. He was trying to ask the man he'd become convinced was a covert government agent for information, without forcing him to reveal his connections.

"I don't know," Harry admitted, "I haven't heard anything from them since. They were based in Washington, and for all I know, everyone there is already dead."

He looked down and shook his head sadly, thinking of Albert Gibson, with whom he'd worked for almost twenty-five years, and Spencer Trilby, the man who'd freed him from the badgering of the CIA and given him a new life.

Ray realized just how profoundly changed the world was. Their country, the most powerful on earth, no longer had a functioning intelligence community. It was a safe bet that the military and civilian authorities were just as disarrayed. With that in mind, he felt less necessity to preserve their past illusions. Many of their secrets simply weren't worth keeping secret anymore.

"Do you have any theories about what's happened?" Ray asked the question allowing plenty of latitude for the agent's answer. He could preserve whatever level of cover he thought was still necessary.

Harry thought about the question. He sighed and looked up at the frigid, clear, night sky, with its twinkling stars and half-moon. Unchanging...uncaring...all our troubles come to nothing when all's said and done. I'm a spy. Who'll know or care in a thousand years? Finally he composed his thoughts and took a deep breath before answering.

"There's been a war going on for the last five years. The clone we know as Xena has become the Destroyer of Nations. Her enemy is the Goddess Athena, who has positioned herself to rule mankind through our own devotion to science, technology, and modern warfare. The goddess was responsible for the deaths of Xena's daughter, Eve, and her partner, Gabrielle. I believe the Destroyer of Nations is committed to bringing Athena down." He paused for a moment and noticed that everyone except Ray was regarding him as if he were a maniac. "You can believe me or not, but I will tell you that over the last five years, the group I work for have been her allies, and we have built her an army."

"You can't...you must not..." Ray was stuttering in horror at what Harry had told them, for better than anyone, he knew what the Destroyer of Nations was capable of, especially without Gabrielle's moderating influence. "She will not hesitate to destroy the world in her quest for vengeance. Harry, she isn't even fully human, and now...now there are no limits to what she will do. With an army to back her, she will become the Conqueror."

"Her army won't be ready until March, Ray," Harry admitted, "so she can't be behind all this. There's only her right now," but that wasn't really true, and though he only had suspicions, he realized that they were based on denial, "and maybe two others."

"What two others?" Ray narrowed his eyes.

"There may be two clones with her. They escaped from the lab where they were being created, back in April of 2004. We thought they'd joined her, but we weren't sure."

Eight months ago, Ray mused, plenty of time to act for someone as ruthless and decisive as Xena. "What kind of clones, Harry? Clones of her? Clones of Gabrielle?"

"Enhanced clones of Xena," Harry said, and as he revealed this, he realized some other things as well, "according to the timetable, she may also have her officer corps by now."

Ray groaned out loud and covered his face with his hands. "How many?" He asked.

"She may have as many as ninety cloned warriors at her command."

"All clones of herself?"

"Yes," the agent answered, "eighty-eight exact duplicates, and two that are engineered to move over twice as fast as she can."

Ray Fell looked at the agent in shock. Each revelation seemed worse than the last.

"And what other assets does she have?" Ray asked. He was beginning to think like a soldier again after four decades...an ex-soldier who had studied ancient warfare and realized how little it differed in some respects from modern warfare.

"We don't know," Harry told him, "we were never able to track her movements or discover her contacts. After she left Columbia she had help. I...we...were taking her to Washington," he began hesitantly, "we were aboard a jet over the city, and she just vanished out of the cabin at 20,000 feet. We discovered that she'd gone home briefly and then left again. There was no trace of her on the public air carriers, and no records of her travel. It was as if she moved instantly from place to place whenever she wanted, and we couldn't follow her. That was shortly after I asked you about the chakram, remember?"

Ray did remember. He remembered the mission video Harry had shown and the supposedly hypothetical questions the agent had asked about the Temple of the Chakram, the nature of the weapons themselves, and the possible uses for them. That had been over five years ago. Xena had been patient, and she had prepared for her campaign far in advance. She had moved step-by-step, but even in the beginning, she had been steps ahead. At this late date, with the first moves already made, there would be little anyone could do to stop her, even if they had the assets to deploy and knew what was going on.

"She most certainly had help, Harry," Ray said, "the help of her patron god. In Gabrielle's scrolls, the bard often referred to the Olympians' mode of travel; appearing and disappearing in flashes of light. There was a flash of light on the plane, wasn't there, Harry?"

"There was a flash of intense blue light," he admitted, just like the flash she disappeared in at the temple after the air strike. But that time, there had also been a flash of golden light a moment later.

"_Then Ares, the great God of War, appeared to his Chosen Warrior in a blaze of azure, colored like the heart of a flame, and offered to her his Blessing on her campaign."_ Ray recited, "That's how Gabrielle described Ares' appearance to Xena at the beginning of her war against Rome, in the scroll, _One Against An Army_. In 58 BC, Xena declined his Blessing and chose to fight without it because she had renounced her role as a Conqueror and didn't want to lose her soul to the _katalepsis_. The choice had a lot to do with Gabrielle's presence and influence."

"Because she didn't want to disappoint her lover by becoming a bloodthirsty warlord again?" Harry asked.

"Because in Gabrielle, Xena found a reason to love, to accept love into her heart, both the love she felt for her partner, and a love of mankind. Harry, she was the daughter of the God of War. Her natural love was for battle and conquest, not for her fellow man. In Gabrielle, she found an inspiration that allowed her human soul to rule her divine blood. Gabrielle's love was her drug...a balm for her bloodthirsty mania."

"And now that she's dead?"

"And now she's dead, and Xena has an army of ninety clones, with a larger force to come in March? She has no love for mankind and has probably accepted Ares' Blessing. She is fighting a war of vengeance and conquest. She will stop at nothing and cares for nothing but the success of her campaign to destroy Athena. That's why she took the Chakram of Day five years ago. Even then, she probably had a plan.

You see, Harry, she was already the foremost tactician of her day, and tactics don't change as much as weapons or assets. Now she is preparing her battlefield, removing potential challengers and the advantages of modern technology. She is moving to level the field between herself and the goddess. In doing so, she will try to ensure that the final battle will depend on her warriors' personal weapons prowess, their bravery, and violent face-to-face bloodshed...all those aspects of warfare ruled over by her patron god.

Add to that, she holds a god-killing weapon. If she has also accepted Ares' Blessing, then the outcome is almost preordained. This was a fact everyone lived by in the ancient world, and she believes it viscerally. She will defeat her enemies and kill the goddess, and then she will rule what remains. It will be a world based on individual mastery, warrior skills, and ferocity, not on science, technology, and law. She will rule an empire, not create a democracy."

Most of that had become apparent back in June, when Harry had talked with Ray and Alexander Williams in the Congressional Diner. Back then, Harry had come to understand what helping Xena would mean, but seeing it becoming reality was another thing. He realized that like most modern men, he lived in a world of ideas, where concepts could be weighed and analyzed in the abstract. Xena lived in a world of realities, of blood and guts, where decisions were made with a sword, not a conversation. The two worlds had begun to clash, and taken by surprise, the modern world would fall.

"You see, Harry, when Xena fought Caesar, she had only Gabrielle as a constant ally. Do you remember reading _The Eternal City_? They infiltrated Caesar's palace in Rome, decimated the Praetorian Guard there, and escaped with Eve. In the years before that, they inflicted a constant stream of casualties on the Roman legions. Now Xena has clones of herself as allies...maybe ninety of them. She understands modern weapons and will use what she can without mercy. Before she leads her full army onto the field, she will lay waste to nations and end millions of lives. To her, they have no intrinsic value. They are nothing but obstacles.

We don't know what other weapons she has amassed. We can't know what she has been able to capture from her enemies. We can only make the most general assumptions based on knowing her goals and history. I can tell you this though. When she was a warlord acting as Ares' Favorite, she was merciless to her enemies. They feared her, with good reason. Gabrielle tells us this in _Sins Of The Past_. No one but Athena would understand that now. I think that what's left of this world will be Xena's within a year, because without Gabrielle, this world is facing something it has never seen."

As Harry and Ray chewed on their thoughts of the coming inferno, Lynn softly strummed and Helen chewed her nails. Allan looked up at the sky, where no demands on him had ever come from and where he could get lost in an impersonal grandeur. Across the fire, Angie looked at Dana and opened her mouth. Dana carefully fed her another Dorito.

_**January 7, 2006 - Columbia, South Carolina**_

It was shift change on Friday afternoon. The squad room held only a dozen officers. They sat around the table in silence with an air of resigned depression and fatigue. The soft wheezing of their breath could be heard as it passed through the full-face respirators they'd worn almost constantly since December 14th when the first evidence of plague was reported in the city. Since that day, several thousand cases of small pox, flu, and Ebola had been diagnosed. The most affected groups were medical personnel and the public employees who were on the streets. They covered more ground, came in contact with more potential disease carriers, and had often been called in to support ambulance and EMT crews working with the afflicted. In the last two weeks, almost 70% of the force had been infected.

Alexander Williams looked up through the faceplate of his mask. A sergeant, the highest-ranking officer left, had just entered the room. The other tired patrolmen gave him their attention.

"Gentlemen," he said, "we just got an unprecedented directive from the state's Deputy Attorney General, who's assumed the responsibilities of the governor's office this afternoon. He's been unable to contact federal authorities. He's been unable to contact his counterparts in North Carolina, Tennessee, or Georgia. Now, while there's no reliable estimate of the death toll, video from helicopter flyovers has revealed unattended dead in the streets of every city that's been visited. In most places it actually sounds worse than here.

Well, the DAG admitted that there was no realistic way to maintain control at the state level and he released the localities from enforcing state laws." The sergeant looked each man in the eyes before continuing. "Bottom line is, I guess I'm in charge of Columbia's law enforcement, but that's where the problem lies. See, there's no Columbia municipal codes with respect to maintaining basic order. We always just used the state and federal laws. Guys, I'll be honest here. I don't know what to do and I don't know if anything we do will help anymore. I'm open to suggestions."

The room was silent. Nobody even moved. What they'd just heard was the abdication of central authority. Rule was being turned over, not to the states, but to the municipalities. The union had dissolved itself, something that the Civil War had been fought to avoid. For all practical purposes, at least here in the southeast, the United States had ceased to exist.

Alex had spent his adult years as a cop. He had given his duties the better part of his life. Along the way, he'd accepted the necessities of the job...the compromises and long hours it demanded, because he'd always felt that law and order were the necessity that separated his country from many others around the world. Whenever he'd read a news story of some bloody uprising or revolution overseas, he'd thank god that he'd been born in a stable nation. Though America had plenty of faults, something he knew well as a racial minority, still the available options were mostly worse. Besides, he'd grown up in Columbia; it was home. Now though, everything had changed.

Alexander rose to his feet, nodded to the sergeant and his fellow officers, and headed out the door. The sergeant was asking for suggestions. Alex voted with his feet. If central authority had lapsed, then his next responsibility was to the individuals who were dear to his heart. He walked out of the station for the last time and got in his car.

On his way home, he looked at the empty streets and empty stores. The Congressional Diner was carefully closed down. The Columbia School of Martial Science was boarded up, unchanged for over five years. He drove around a body lying face down in the street, scattering a flock of crows and a mean looking dog. He'd seen that more than he cared to think about during the last couple weeks. Even a week ago, someone would have collected the body the same day it fell. Not anymore.

Karen met him at the door. She too wore a respirator. In their new ritual of greeting, they touched faceplates and hugged.

"You have the stuff packed?" He asked. She nodded. She'd been packed for weeks.

"We're finally leaving?"

"Yes," he told her, "just one stop and then we're out of here. Sweetheart, they've more or less dissolved the Union."

Karen looked at him in shock for a moment as he moved past her. He walked into their bedroom and pulled down the prepacked duffel bag from the shelf at the top of their closet. He added the boxes of ammunition for his service pistol and walked back through the house to begin loading up their car. Karen had already taken out the suitcase she'd kept beside the front door for the last three weeks, just hoping for this. When Alex came back inside, it was to drag out the cases of bottled water and the boxes of MREs. He came back one last time and went to the basement to shut off the gas and water at the meters, and shut down the circuit breakers. The last thing Karen brought out to the car was the massive photo album that held a lifetime of memories, and the carton of replacement P-100 particle filter cartridges for their hazard masks. Between the two of them, they used four a day. They still had enough for another month.

They took a last look back at their darkened house. Somehow it already looked sad and empty, abandoned like the city they called home. Alex put the car in gear and drove down the street towards the south side of town. He had one stop to make before leaving Columbia. _"As our most senior student, you can help most by watching out for the others," _Gabrielle had told him on that last fateful night He was still the most senior student and he still felt that responsibility.

There was no phone service anymore and no way to call ahead. He honked twice as he pulled into the driveway. Ahead under the trellis sat a car covered by a heavy tarp. Alex knew that underneath the oilcloth was Xena's black Z-28 Camaro. He'd brought over enough cans of gas for it. Danielle had made sure to run it each Saturday, lurching and stalling it until she finally mastered the racing clutch and vertical gate shifter. Now he saw that the windows of the house and the kitchen door had been sealed with plywood. He got out, went up the steps to the porch, and pounded on the front door. After a few minutes he heard a muffled voice inside demanding to know who he was. He shouted his name and moments later the door swung open.

Danielle stood in the front hallway, dressed in desert camo BDUs and wearing a US Navy gas mask with a single large ABC canister filter. She was cradling an M-4 carbine in the crook of her right arm, the stock resting along the outside her biceps. Behind her, two large duffel bags leaned against the doorframe leading to the parlor.

"Ready?" He asked as he entered.

The CWO nodded and slung the carbine over her shoulder, then they each hefted a bag and went out onto the porch. Danielle snapped open a key case and carefully locked the front door of the Pappas house. The old place had been her home since she'd moved to Columbia in 2001, and she'd stayed even after Xena and Gabrielle had disappeared. She'd done a responsible job of keeping the place up for its owners ever since. Now she looked back at the building one more time, shook her head, and followed Alex to the car. She greeted Karen in the mask muffled speech they'd grown accustomed to over the last month, tossed her bags into the back seat with her carbine, and climbed in after them. Alex wasted no time in starting the car and driving off.

They headed south, driving out of the city following Bluff Rd to its junction with I-71. Their route had been long planned, and Alex was happy to see almost no traffic moving on the highway. Everyone who had opted to leave was already long gone, like Ray and Lynn, the Chu clan, or Owen and Debbie Chambers. Soon the sign announcing I-26 came up, and Alex stayed on the highway, the compass on the dashboard read a few points off due north. I-26 turned northwest after eight miles, and Alex followed it, finally leaving the city of Columbia behind.

The group followed I-26 for 150 miles, past Newberry, Clinton, and Spartanburg, until it dead-ended just west of Asheville. There they took I-40, following it west for eighteen miles until they reached US-19. The road got smaller, finally becoming a two-lane asphalt road. The sun was going down as they entered the Cherokee Indian Reservation. The road twisted and turned for ten miles before its intersection with US-441. Here they turned north, and two miles later entered the southern end of Great Smokey Mountains National Park. According to their plan, they would meet Ray and Lynn somewhere nearby.

The owners of the Congressional Diner had been among the first people that Alex had warned to leave. They had heeded his warning, while staring in horror at the full-face respirator mask he wore. They'd packed up the next day. He hoped they'd made it safely in their antique mini-busses.

Alex started into the park, keeping his eyes peeled for campgrounds. The first one he came to was only a mile-and-a-half inside the park boundaries. He slowed and made the right-hand turn into the campground.

"Take a look," Danielle said from the back seat. She was gesturing at the unprotected people eyeing them from the campsites. No one was wearing a mask.

"Leave 'em on a while longer," Alex advised, just being cautious, "you can't wear a mask you don't have, even if you should."

Danielle nodded in agreement. Alex continued down the camp road and took the first turnoff leading right. They searched and found no evidence of Ray and Lynn. In the same fashion they took the second road to the right and again found nothing but more unhappy and nervous people. The campers quickly noted Alexander's police uniform and Danielle's BDUs and military issue assault rifle. Like Harry Tasker had, Alex, Karen, and Danielle continued their methodical search. It was the only way to precede. And like Harry Tasker, they found their friends on the third road, with their VW mini-busses set up parallel in a campsite with the colorful canopy bridging them overhead.

It was a joyous reunion, hoped for, but less and less expected with each passing day. It was an even less expected surprise to find the Taskers right next door. Alex parked in the site just past them and finally took off his mask. No one in the park was wearing one.

_**January 17, 2006 - The Northern Persian Gulf**_

"There," Xena said as she pointed through the special glazing of the bridge to a shadow on the water about a quarter mile distant. Prima's eyes locked onto the target, black on black, and estimated its length with a calibrated range finder scope. The distant hull read mostly as an absence of the slight reflections from the sliver of moon and stars that shone down on the placid chop all around them. Higher up, the superstructure was lit from within the bridge, but the important targets were much lower.

"Got it," Prima acknowledged after a few moments, "target bearing 347º, range 431 yards, length 1,090 feet...locking on." She entered the data into a fire control computer.

"Five second bursts. Fire at will," Xena commanded.

Prima flipped up a safety cap on the console and depressed a large red button. High torque motors jerked the MK 15's gun carriage around to conform the targeting radar's data to the fire control computer's coordinates. A fraction of a second later, the low-pitched belch of firing was combined with the high pitched whine of the rotating barrels and the zip of projectiles. A gout of flames eight feet long lit the nearby water as the Phalanx fired at a rate of 4,500 rounds per minute. The MK 15 tracked its own output and adjusted its pitch a fraction of a degree for windage. It fired for five seconds, ceased for a heartbeat as it adjusted to a new target's coordinates, opened fire again for five seconds, and then repeated the sequence two more times.

A quarter mile away, four groups of 375 20mm, depleted uranium, armor piercing rounds breached the hull of the supertanker Exxon Malachi in four places. The rounds struck a yard above the water line, punching neat rows of overlapping perforations into each of the ship's four internal oil tanks. Almost immediately, the cargo of high-grade Kuwaiti heavy crude oil began gushing out into the night-darkened waters. From the supertanker's deck, spotlights stabbed down to light the hull as the crew inspected for damage. They didn't immediately realize that they'd been shot. The tanker's cargo of roughly 3.1 million barrels of oil was gushing out at a gravity fed rate of almost 32,000 barrels per hour.

"Secure that gun," Xena ordered. She shifted the annunciator to bring the Miss Artiphys to three-quarter speed as she took the wheel, turning to port and making their course 285º. "We need a fresh magazine for our next stop," she remarked to the "special", who immediately moved to reload the Phalanx.

The Miss Artiphys sped over the water at 67 knots, heading just north of west towards the Saudi off shore oil fields near Khafji. Their sailing time was about 45 minutes. The black hydrofoil ran without beacons, nearly invisible in the dark. At the end of their run, Xena slowed to 4 knots and brought the vessel to within a furlong of the main pipeline before ordering Prima to open fire.

"Firing on the first target," Prima reported as she depressed the red button.

The Phalanx growled for a full twenty seconds in response, emptying the 1,500 round magazine into a set of 6-foot diameter feeder pipes running parallel to each other along a sand and gravel levee. The attack damaged over a hundred yards of piping. The resulting hemorrhage of crude oil fountained out under 3psi of pressure. The clones reloaded the MK 15 as quickly as they could and the gun swung around to its second target. This time, a ten-second burst demolished a tanker loading station capable of pumping two million barrels a day.

Somehow, somewhere, the leaking oil was all part of a contiguous stream, through pipes and down well heads, and finally, into layers of sand and rock where the billions of barrels of Persian Gulf crude oil lay in reserves like Safaniya, Zuluf, and Marjan. The outflow from the tanker and the Saudi pipelines were the first of a series of targets to be hit within a 150 mile circle that also included Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran. Those four countries produced about 82% of the area's oil. Xena and Prima would strike Qatar and the United Arab Emirates as they left the gulf.

While the physical damage to the pipes and the environmental impact was highly destructive in the short term, it was an integral part of Xena's plan to cripple modern technology. By depriving the world's armies of their gas and oil, she could greatly decrease their effectiveness. Air power would become strategically nonviable and no conventionally powered ship would be combat ready. The Phalanx opened a doorway with its hail of projectiles, but the real damage would be done on the molecular level.

Into the gushing oil spills, the Destroyer of Nations released submicroscopic nanobots, developed with the best of intentions years before by Dr. Eric Drexler, for cleaning up accidental slicks. The tiny self-replicating nanobots indiscriminately broke down hydrocarbons and reorganized some of the basic organic molecules to replicate themselves. The remainder, they rendered into its elemental constituents. Working in the secret lab in Yokohama, Dr. Drexler had created the first Von Neumann machines

The infinitesimal creations that the _strategos_ introduced into the Persian Gulf oil reserves were bugs of the very sort that opponents of nanotechnology had prophesized as the source of doomsday. In the presence of hydrocarbons, the nanobots reproduced like a virus, multiplying arithmetically and eventually pervading the environment. Like any arithmetic growth curve, the beginning would be slow and the initial numbers small, but there would come a point of saturation, reached in what seemed like an instant, when the last few generations doubled their numbers. It might take weeks or months to reach the saturation point, but the final outcome would make its impact like a comet. Then like a virus, "infected" oil added to international reserves would simply widen the affected area. Refineries and distribution centers for the finished products would soon host swarms of oil eating nanobots. Xena had projected that it would take about eight weeks for the petroleum dependant world to grind to a halt.

By noon of the next day, the Miss Artiphys was passing the Strait of Hormuz and heading into the Gulf of Oman. Xena steered a course of 100º and brought the hydrofoil to flank speed. Soon they would be in the Arabian Sea, beginning their cruise back to the decimated New World. They would clear Oman to the south and then steer a course of 210º that would take them down the eastern coast of Africa, all the way through the Mozambique Channel before they turned west to round the Cape of Good Hope. There were things to do before the main army was ready, a timetable to keep, and a plan to bring to fruition.

The first twinge came at 1130 hours local time on January 21st. Xena slowed the Miss Artiphys to 40 knots in two-foot swells, four miles off the coast of northern Tanzania. The sky was clear overhead, the ambient temperature about 72ºF. With the wind chill on deck, it was closer to 50º. It was something else that Xena felt though, as she stood at the wheel in the weatherproofed bridge.

It came as a tingle at the edge of her awareness, and while she easily maintained control of her craft, she allowed a segment of her consciousness to contemplate this unknown sensation. It wasn't wholly unpleasant, only unexpected. That in itself was worthy of attention because it wasn't part of the plan. The _strategos_ tried to decide if it constituted a threat. The clone still hadn't reached a conclusion about it when Prima came topside from her berth in the cabin. She stared out to sea, swiftly turning in a circle and dismissing her surroundings as normal.

"You felt it too," Xena said. It was not a question.

"I felt...something," Prima acknowledged, making neither judgements nor conjectures.

Both clones eventually came to face towards the distant land off the starboard side. The enhanced "special's" finely tuned senses pinpointed what Xena could only feel vaguely.

"It comes from there," she stated with certainty, lifting her arm and pointing 60º off the starboard beam.

"Yes," Xena agreed, then, almost too softly to be heard, "like a second sunrise..."

**Continued in Chapter 7**

57


	7. Clonefic Part 3 Chapter 7

Clonefic

Part 3 Chapter 7

By Phantom Bard

**For Disclaimer**: See Part 3 Chapter 1

_"Sir, the second phase is being carried out incommunicado. There is no way to trace what is happening there. Like the mirror site, the system is fully automated and there are no living personnel. I can't think of a more secure setup."_

Harry Tasker to Spencer Trilby on March 28, 2002

_**January 18, 2006 - Beneath Bed 1, Olduvai Gorge, Northern Tanzania**_

She awoke with a jerk though she really couldn't remember having gone to sleep. Now she found herself in a place that she'd never seen before, with pictures moving before her eyes, with sounds and words filling her ears, and with a ravenous hunger growling in her belly. She also found herself naked beneath a thin sheet, but it was pleasantly warm here, wherever "here" was. In fact she felt fairly comfortable, strange circumstances aside, and though the surface she was lying on was smooth and hard, at least it wasn't cold. Some warm food and a cool drink would have been nice though.

For a long time she only watched the pictures. They meant something...she was sure of it. Soon she recognized herself, whenever her self appeared. She also recognized the tall dark haired woman who seemed to accompany her so much of the time. She realized that she knew that woman and wondered where the woman was. _That would be Xena_, she told herself as the name popped into her head, _where's she gone off to now?_

As she continued to watch, (for what actually seemed like days), she slowly began to remember other things that she was pretty sure she hadn't seen since awakening. They were things that grew from the pictures and sounds, but hadn't been among them at all. Sometimes they contradicted what she was being shown, and when that happened, she believed what she remembered. She had always believed that the senses could be tricked much more easily than the soul. _What the hell? Heyyyyy, that's Joxer! And what's with the bell? That's Aphrodite? Huh. From what I remember, she'd cursed him at birth, what with that cleft palate and the fistula...oh yuck! Whose life is this anyway?_

Then the pictures started to come faster. The words sounded rushed, with the voices speaking quicker then she knew they should. Things were wrong at the speed she was seeing and hearing them. She knew better. She knew how things had been. She remembered. She remembered everything. _I died and left Xena behind, heartbroken and in a rage! She'll revert and go off, I just know it. How long has it been? Where the hell am I? I've got to get out of here. I've got to find her!_

Suddenly the pictures stopped. The voices fell silent. Now she could see with her eyes and hear with her ears. The download had ended. Moving slowly, she lifted her hands to her head, plucked off the wires, and looked around to her side. She was lying next to herself and her self was looking back at her. Their eyes widened in surprise rather than fear.

As one, they offered each other hesitant smiles and said, "Hi, I'm Gabrielle. Have you seen Xena, and do you know where we are?"

As one, their mouths dropped open in shock. All around them, for as far as they could see, their conversation was being repeated by an infinite crowd of themselves, all starting to sit up and look around in confusion and wonder. They each wrapped themself in a sheet, stood up, yawned, and stretched.

It took a while to get past the impact of finding herself replicated, but eventually they all started working together. They took a head count and found that they numbered 8,000. It quickly became obvious that no one there wasn't Gabrielle, and none of them could claim to know anything more than what the rest knew. None of them knew where they were or why. All of them were hungry and worried. The throng began exploring their surroundings and ended up forming an ever-extending line that penetrated each corridor and room. They discovered a dining area, labs filled with cryptic equipment, locker rooms filled with an endless repetition of clothing, and a storage hall filled with backpacks containing identical sets of survival gear and rations. The Gabrielles sat down to eat, still wrapped in their sheets, before they bothered to dress.

Eventually they came to a consensus; they needed to find Xena, and the choices were to either wait for her here, or to leave and search. She certainly wasn't anywhere inside with them. They'd looked everywhere and hadn't found a single Xena.

It took the rest of the day for them to discover how to leave, although part of that time was spent asleep. When they did discern how to get out, they each shouldered a backpack and walked up a tunnel, following the white painted arrows to a steel door they'd discovered. The Gabrielle closest to it smashed the glass front over a control panel and pushed the large button that said, "Push Here To Leave". Someone had made things simple for them at every turn, but who that was remained a mystery. The Gabrielles originally suspected that it was the missing Xena(s).

The steel door rolled up. It was a dry and eroded wasteland that greeted them. The exit was set into the side of a ravine, and had been hidden by a surface covering of dirt and rocks. One by one they stepped out into the bright morning sunlight, squinting and wrinkling their noses as they sniffed the already hot dry air. Above the door a light blinked each time one of them stepped through, and when the last of them had passed, the door slid shut. A small landslide buried it with fresh dirt and scree, and finally a few small boulders. The Gabrielles regarded it for a moment and then gave a collective shrug. They hadn't been intending to go back inside anyway.

Their eyes slowly adjusted to the bright sun and sky and found it too bright for comfort. They searched their packs and put on the floppy, wide-brimmed boonie hats that they'd been given, then spread sunblock on their fair skin. A low aggregate rumbling of muttered comments and speculations filled the air. Finally they began to walk; a mass of compact blondes, all dressed in identical desert camo BDUs, and all beginning to organize their impressions of this new existance into a narrative.

Though they didn't know it, that day was the 21st of January 2006. They had missed about 50 months since dying and things had changed. But now they were up and they had a goal. The Gabrielles began their search for Xena by moving through the gorge and heading north. A visceral compass directed them at the subconscious level, without discussions or maps. They felt no threats in their surroundings and therefore took no measures for stealth. They went forward, and in such a large group, they fairly radiated an aura of inquisitiveness, basic goodwill, and determination.

After a couple of hours they emerged from the gorge, stepping out onto the plains that surround Olduvai. Soon after that they encountered other people, herders and farmers mostly, and these passed the word of a great miracle. The news of the strange and wondrous migration of identical white women spread rapidly across the countryside, and the Gabrielles were greeted as whole villages turned out to watch them pass by. The people had hidden their livestock and were thankful that the strangers didn't stop. Such numbers would surely eat a locality to starvation in a single day.

_**March 2, 2006 - The Mirror Site, Washington, D.C.**_

It was 0400 hours EST. Under the burned out building at 1005 E St. NW, a flurry of activity animated the rooms and tunnels buried deep under the block bounded by E and F Sts. and 10th and 11th Sts. On three levels, clones donned their black uniforms, slung backpacks of equipment, and armed themselves, loading assault rifles and sidearms. Each carried a longsword in a back scabbard. Each wore a dagger on her left hip. On her right hip, each bore a Combined Chakram. The Destroyer of Nations' cloned warriors were finally ready.

Among them moved the guardian, Secunda, dressed in identical body armor, but bearing her paired Glock 18 autopistols in shoulder holsters and the magazine rigs on her thighs. She carried no chakram or bladed weapons yet, for her duty was still to protect the army in the _strategos' _absence. In the mirror site's control room, she uncovered a console that she had been instructed about almost two years before.

Her first action was the activation of a beacon. It contacted the _strategos_ and informed her that her army was ready to move. The message was sent out in an alphanumeric cipher that used coded battle language from ancient Thrace. It broadcast until it was acknowledged, only a few seconds after it began.

The second action was the opening of the main hatchway. This comprised a section of the original building's basement floor. A pair of heavy doors swung downwards, opening like a trap and dumping the wreckage of the building above them into a deep pit below. Three stories worth of building debris dropped into a five-story deep shaft, leaving the area above almost completely clear. Into the cleared space, at a depth of eight feet below the original basement floor, a second pair of doors slid out from recesses to the sides, forming a new partial floor.

Secunda viewed the results through a periscope mounted video feed and then released a cloud of nerve gas to clear the surrounding blocks. Heavy white vapor spread from ductwork above the new floor, its volume forcing it up out of the basement and into the streets. It was just a precaution though. So many people had died so quickly in the plagues that Xena and Prima had released, that only half the city had survived to be killed when USAMRIID was destroyed at the end of December 2005. Almost everyone else had succumbed to the cloud of germs that blew in from the Ft. Detrick. Now the Nation's Capitol was a ghost town. Even so, Secunda followed her orders to the letter. The nerve gas would have given the emerging army a four-block perimeter...the minimum space that the _strategos_ had calculated as a necessary toehold to successfully take the city.

An hour later, while the first light of dawn slunk across the sky, Secunda activated the massive ventilation fans that cleared the gas from the perimeter. As it spread out into the surrounding neighborhoods and dissipated, she unlocked the tunnel doors. Even before these were fully open, squads of clones advanced from the long passage that led up from the mirror site to the surface. They came with their weapons drawn, moving up and covering each other like commando teams. They established an ever-expanding zone of occupation around the site, clearing building after building and securing their perimeter. They moved like any invading force, communicating with each other and with Secunda when necessary, until they held a pentagonal section of the city bordered by 15th St, New York Ave, Massachusetts Ave, 2nd St, and Constitution Ave. Within that perimeter lay the FBI building, the Archives, the Depts. of Justice, Commerce, and Labor, the IRS, and Judiciary Square, all deserted and standing without a purpose. Secunda made their temporary headquarters in the FBI building, diagonally across E St from the mirror site.

The next morning, after the clones had reported all areas of occupation secured, Secunda chose four hundred clones and marched west down Constitution Ave. They passed the Ellipse and gazed at the empty White House.

The President and his staff had long ago fled the plagues. Marine One had lifted from the south lawn with the First Family and the White House staff, not long after the Taskers had left the city. The big helicopter had flown to Andrews Air Force Base where its passengers had joined the Joint Chiefs of Staff aboard Air Force One. They had fled Washington and the Destroyer's plagues, hoping to preserve the nation's government. Now they were hiding somewhere in the Midwest, isolated and irrelevant, and perhaps even dead. They couldn't travel, unless it was on foot or horseback. Almost all of America's oil had become tainted with Xena's nanobots and there was no more gasoline.

The clones broke into assault teams of twelve when they reached Virginia Ave, and they moved forward as if expecting opposition. Every tree and shrub was examined for traps and remote cameras. Every building was cleared with infrared sensors and then subjected to electromagnetic bombardment. They reached their objective, between 21st and 22nd Sts, and conducted a high-speed assault, sparing no hiding place or bolthole. Their target was the National Academy of Sciences building, and before they'd finished securing it, the deserted structure was riddled with bullet holes and grenade craters. The clones detonated charges to perforate the foundation in their search for the hidden subterranean spaces that Xena had ordered them to find. Stairwells in the three-story building were subjected to close scrutiny as possible sites of disguised entrances. Any shred of suspect information was collected. Any intelligence gleaned here would be presented to the _strategos_.

After two hours of intensive searching, no hidden entrances had been found. Secunda contacted the Destroyer of Nations to report that they were ready to demolish the site.

"_Strategos, _we have searched to protocols, and we have found nothing," the "special" told her commanding general.

"Check for accessways in the lawn," Xena instructed, "they may appear to be only hatches covering valves for the sprinkler system. Also check the utilities access doors in the surrounding sidewalks. If ya find nothing, I want even the storm sewers checked. Athena's headquarters and lab were there." Its purpose was dedicated to her, and the chemical trail from Kishihara's corpse had led to this building over a year ago.

They had seen evidence of the devotion the occupants of this place held for their enemy. The roofline just below the gables was decorated with bas-reliefs of owls. Among the eight bronze door panels commemorating great scientists, one pictured Charles Darwin with Athena's owl behind him. The owl appeared again, joined by a Medusa's head and Athena as well, all emblazoned on separate medallions flanking the doorway. More owls leered down at the clones from the corners of the marble pediment above the door. That ubiquitous owl was symbolic of wisdom; it was what the scientists here worshipped, and in doing so, they had built a modern temple to wisdom's goddess, Athena. The owl had been her personal symbol in ancient times, and it was still hers, try as the moderns might to divorce its essence from its patron.

Within the great hall, the taunting symbology continued. Among the decorated panels of the ceiling dome, the science of Anthropology was illustrated with a primitive and a Caesar. Below it, on the northern wall, was a painted mural celebrating the theft of fire from Helios' chariot by Prometheus, aided by Athena. She had been behind it all from the start, predisposing mankind to the quest for knowledge that would ensure her worship as the patroness of wisdom.

Below the mural, carved atop pilasters framing the doorway beneath the painting, stood figures symbolizing darkness and light. They opposed each other across the entranceway as they complimented each other architecturally. That dichotomy, Dark and Light, Day and Night, had been such a basic division throughout creation that even the gods had not been immune. Yet at evening and morning and during eclipses the two blended, tainting each other's purity and hinting at the element of conflict each hid within. A day could be dark, just as a night could be bright. Good could breed evil just as evil could be redeemed. And all too often, work done with the best intentions led to devastation.

Secunda dispatched teams of clones to carry out the _strategos'_ orders and then waited for their reports as they searched.

Not ten minutes passed before a clone hurried up to report. A squad searching the grounds had found a suspected entrance. They had examined a sprinkler head on the southwest side of the lawn near the Albert Einstein Memorial grove. It had been a decoy. The dummy sprinkler head had been easily removed with a twist. Beneath it, instead of a feeder pipe, they had found a rotating dial. The squad leader had ordered the others to back off and then she had rotated the dial. Behind her, a click had signaled the displacement of a section of the green granite star map embedded in the memorial's base. A pie segment, with a radius of 14 feet and an arced border 11 feet long, had lifted two inches above its base level along one radial edge. The opposite edge was hinged.

Secunda listened to the report and then relayed the information to the _strategos._

"Guard the entrance, Secunda," Xena ordered, "Do not enter. I'll join you there."

Fifteen minutes later, Xena and Prima arrived from the Gangplank Marina pedaling racing bikes. The two "specials" acknowledged each other with only a glance. Secunda led the Destroyer of Nations to the suspected entrance. Around it, she'd posted a dozen clones. Each was standing with the muzzle of her weapon trained on the small opening in the star map.

Xena walked right over to the curved edge of the trap door and nudged it up, testing its movement with the toe of her boot. It rose easily, as if counterbalanced. She nodded to Secunda who was standing beside her, then lifted the door partially open. The "special" displayed her enhanced speed. In a heartbeat she had both Glock 18s clear of the holsters and pointing down into the entrance. A foot of flames spewed from the barrels as she emptied the magazines of both pistols in a long unbroken burst, playing the weapons slightly to spray the opening with all 62 available rounds. In the silence that followed, the last tinkling of ejected brass shell casings could be heard on the pavement. At the same unnatural speed, she rocked the handguns back in her palms, released the spent magazines, and brought the pistols down alongside her thighs. The tops of the replacement magazines slipped into the magazine wells in the handgrips and locked in place. She raised the weapons, pulled back the slides with her thumbs and then trained them onto the entrance again. The whole process had taken under two seconds.

The Destroyer of Nations kicked the trap door fully open. Three waiting clones tossed handfuls of light sticks into the darkness below. Some landed on a flight of stairs. Others bounced further down, landing in a corridor that led towards the Academy of Sciences building. At a nod, a squad of clones started down the steps. They clicked on the tactical lights attached to their assault rifles and began moving forward into the corridor. The clones advanced in four groups of three, two groups along each wall. The group leaders crouching low, the seconds standing erect with their rifles over the leaders' shoulders. The third in each group held her rifle out from her body toward the center of the corridor, next to the second's elbow. Secunda started down the steps with Xena directly behind her. The _strategos _lifted a simple ring from a concealing holster at her hip and held the Chakram of Day ready. Two more squads of clones followed.

Originally, the corridor had been lit by florescent fixtures in the ceiling. These no longer functioned, since the PEPCO grid had gone down months ago. Now the clones moved through a black tunnel, lit by the stabbing beams of the tactical gun lights. The groups managed to array the light beams so that they illuminated the corridor from side to side, and from about thirty feet ahead to the far extent of the beams' projection. They held their weapons steady to minimize the jumping and flickering that could conceal a hostile movement. Secunda, trusting that her reaction time would allow her to dodge aside if she saw a muzzle flash from the darkness beyond the light beams, fearlessly walked down the center of the corridor, both machine pistols trained straight ahead at arm's length.

They reached the end of the corridor without encountering anyone. There they found a blank steel door, and Xena recalled an identical one that she'd seen years ago. It had been blocking the tunnel beneath the DOE installation in Georgia that had held the cloning site where she'd found the body of her daughter, Eve. She felt her rage building by reflex, but choked it back with a surge of her will.

"Blast it open," she ordered, "I want 84s thrown in as soon as the door goes down."

A pair of clones immediately moved to the door and attached shaped charges of Composition-4 in a rectangular pattern a foot inside each of the door's corners. Like a Claymore mine, the charges directed the blast's energy in one direction, in this case, the contact surface where they were attached. Unlike a Claymore mine, they contained no steel ball projectiles since they were intended as cutting charges rather than anti-personnel weapons. The remaining clones withdrew down the corridor with Secunda and the _strategos_, and donned goggles and earplugs. A clone set a small box on the floor from which paired red laser beams stabbed out. She adjusted them to touch the door at a point about a foot shy of where they'd converge. Steady twin red spots marked the door six inches apart. The two demolitions clones quickly attached timed fuses to the charges. Each activated two and then ran back to join their comrades

The twenty second delay passed as the clones counted silently and looked away. They covered their ears and lowered their heads as an added precaution. The blast shook the corridor with tremors but produced very little light and surprisingly little sound. The concussion did produce a pressure wave that felt like a solid thump and would have burst eardrums if an unprotected person were too close. As the dust swirled at the far end of the corridor, the closest assault group immediately rose to their feet readying M84 stun grenades. The small box on the floor emitted a chirp, announcing that the laser beams had converged.

"Door's down," a clone reported.

The group of three clones closest to the door flung their M84 "flash/bang" grenades through the breached door. The 175db reports were accompanied by 8 million candela flashes, which blasted out of the jagged edges of the doorframe and lit the corridor's walls in a succession of lightning bolt strobes. The clones were on their feet and charging towards the blasted door, but Secunda was already almost there. She reached the doorframe and spun into the room, weaving and ducking in a blur of motion as she went, one handgun pointing out in each hand as her eyes flicked across the walls and corners. She would fire at the first hint of movement, quicker than any human enemy could aim a weapon at her.

"Clear," she called out as the assault teams reached the entrance.

"Move forward," Xena ordered.

The assault teams charged into the cleared room and tossed flares into the corners. The first trio moved to back up the "special", who was standing at the only interior door. One ignited a flare. At a nod from the guardian, a second clone shot out the lock with a short burst from her assault rifle. Secunda launched herself into the air and took the door off its hinges with a spinning back kick. The flare immediately flipped into the room over her shoulder, lighting the space. The guardian landed with her front leg bent fully at the knee, the other straight out behind her, and the top of her head barely eighteen inches off the ground, presenting a forward target profile barely larger than a one year old child. Both pistols were up and her quick eyes were searching. Two clones leapt into the room and landed to either side, advancing and sweeping the space with their gun lights. The third stood crouched in the doorframe with her rifle trained over Secunda's shoulder.

"Clear," the guardian announced. The assault team set more flares to light the room more evenly.

The remaining nine members of the first squad entered with the Destroyer of Nations on their heels. She noted that the room had been a guard station, with a single desk, chair, and surveillance camera in a rear corner near the ceiling. She noted that a section of the wall opposite the outer door looked like frosted glass. Beside it was a scanning pad for palm prints. A bulletproof, electronically activated, probably one-way viewable security door, Xena thought. Bullets will ricochet off and setting a charge will take time. She nodded to herself, wanting to maintain their momentum.

"Down," she ordered as she hefted her chakram. The clones in the room went prone as Xena launched the ring sidearm.

Any normal steel ring would certainly have struck the glass and rebounded. With a sharp crack, the Chakram of Day embedded a third of its circumference into the milky surface. For a heartbeat, nothing more happened. Then, with a soft crackling like thin ice crazing on flexing sheet metal, a network of cracks spread from the impact point and raced across the surface. With a crystalline ping, the entire sheet fell into tiny irregular shards, like automobile safety glass spraying from a windshield in an accident. The Chakram of Day fell, lodging in a shallow nick that its weight drove into the floor and remaining upright, waiting on its edge for Xena. A clone tossed a flare past it into the next room.

Secunda and the first trio moved through the door, sidestepping the chakram. Xena followed them, retrieving her weapon. The space they entered had been a control room, and like the first room the assault team had entered at the Georgia site, it was filled with computers and other equipment. Beyond a glass wall opposite the door lay another large cloning lab.

The setting was familiar to the Destroyer of Nations. The machinery, the brooding darkness, the menacing shadowed shapes of the cylindrical tanks, and the curtained off examination cubicles along the right wall. The rest of the first assault team entered the control room, training their weapons on the dark lab beyond the glass.

"Take out the windows," Xena ordered.

A trio of clones opened fire, shattering the glass. Another trio flung flares into the lab, revealing the interior in wavering, hissing red.

"Search it. Find out where the main entrance is," Xena commanded.

The first assault team began spreading out in threes, clearing the lab yard by yard to ensure that there were no living inhabitants. For the first time, the smell of death hung in the air stronger than the smoke from the flares. There were certainly dead inhabitants inside. The _strategos_ was almost sure they lay on gurneys in the curtain draped examination bays, just as had been the case with her daughter at the DOE site. She really didn't want to look. The best she could hope for was to find the decomposing cadaver of one of her four known enemies, Elainis, Callisto, Mavican, or Achilles.

"_Strategos," _a clone called uncertainly. She was standing by one of the exam cubicles, holding back the drape with the barrel of her rifle...and she was trembling.

Xena felt a twinge of apprehension as she paced towards the waiting clone, though no true premonitions came to her. Applying logic, she expected to find the body of one of her enemies, but she braced herself in case she was forced to confront another clone of her daughter. The _strategos_ had to wonder if even that sight could penetrate the ice that had grown around her heart over the last five years. She still wasn't ready for what lay behind the curtain. The sight stopped her in her tracks.

In the cubicle Athena had contrived to leave a last reminder that she was a goddess, and therefore capable of almost anything. She fought with modern weapons and modern technology. She waged war, not just against the bodies of her enemies, but against their morale and psyches as well. Her forces had covertly slaughtered millions, leaders, military personnel, and common civilians alike, with engineered microbes. Against Xena and her patron god there was no limit to the pressure she would apply, for there was no point in waging a war unless the desire for victory was paramount. In this conflict, the Goddess of War was waging a campaign that she had waited over two thousand years to prosecute. Its goal was dear to her heart, for it fulfilled an ambition as old as the history of Western civilization. To attain that goal, she'd sought to break the spirit of her rival's Favorite. The evidence of her intentions lay on the gurney. It was the end result of a plan set in motion before Xena's primary site had been destroyed over a year before.

Secunda appeared at Xena's elbow, staring past her general and the nervous soldier.

The body was badly decomposed. Even so, its identity was unquestioned. The frame had been compact, less then five and a half feet tall. Whisps of fine blonde hair still clung to a shriveled scalp stretched tight over the rounded skull. The shrinkage of tendons had twisted the features into a tortured grimace, though the flesh of the cheeks had partially sloughed away. The cadaver's eyes were desiccated and sunken. A coagulated trail of gore traced the fluids that had leaked from the body weeks before...blood mostly, oozing from the mouth, nose, and other orifices of the body. Nylon web straps still restrained the corpse as they had during the last struggles of its life.

The _strategos _looked at the body for a long moment, barely breathing in the stench through her mouth. She memorized the evidence and filed it away to add to her list of grievances. Once the sight would have driven her into a rage that would have burned itself out in the embers of suicide. Now it only served to enhance her resolve and plant a lingering doubt. Xena indexed that doubt for future reference. It might become strategically important one day. She also realized that here again, Athena had miscalculated. She still didn't understand the fundamental change that had occurred in her enemy. As recently as three months ago, the Goddess of War still believed that she was facing the Warrior Princess. Xena filed away that confirmation too. It conferred an advantage. Then she turned away and strode to the center of the lab.

"Set the charges and withdraw," she ordered, her voice ringing out even and cold, "complete the preparations for demolition."

The clones immediately stopped their search for the main entrance and regrouped. Their leader was already walking back to the control room.

"Double the charges," Secunda ordered, "don't leave a single brick standing."

The cloned warriors moved to implement their orders, rapidly and efficiently setting and rigging the explosives at critical structural points. They worked with confidence and speed, mostly unaffected by the discovery of the only body in the lab. None of them had ever met the soulmate of the Warrior Princess.

A quarter hour after discovering Gabrielle's body, Xena stood on Constitution Ave and nodded to Prima. All her troops were accounted for and safely clear. The "special" depressed a button on a detonator control box and a signal was transmitted to the primary charges. The coordinated explosions were followed by a sequence of secondary blasts, and then the building began to implode. The main building, with its domed hall and original wings, the later additions, and even the memorial statue of Albert Einstein all crumbled and collapsed. A cloud of dust rose as the shattered structure fell, blown out into the streets by the tons of masonry cascading to the ground. Sections of the lawn, underlain by hidden subterranean construction, caved in. Even a length of sidewalk and part of 22nd St gave way and violently subsided.

After the dust settled, Xena looked at the remains. Now nothing rose higher than eight feet above ground level. There was nothing recognizable.

Coming here accomplished nothing, she thought. Strategically it was a waste of time. I could've done the same damage with a pinpoint missile strike. The only benefit was seeing Gabrielle's cloned body, dead of Ebola. Maybe Athena hadn't even bothered to do her downloads...just left her body there as a calling card. That's another mistake on her part though. Now I'll know to suspect any Gabrielle clone I meet. But I gave Athena this opportunity to strike at me. And I will not forget that.

_**March 8, 2006 - The North Atlantic**_

The Argo's periscope had showed all that the _chiliarchos_ had needed to see.

"Helm, mark this bearing and proceed at 4 knots. The target is 2,761 yards. Surface us at a distance of fifty yards." The acting captain snapped the grips up against the sides of the stainless steel tube and the periscope slid down as it was retracted from the sail.

"Ahead, 4 knots," the acting helmsman reported.

"Diving officer, make you depth 80 feet."

"Coming to 80 feet," the diving officer confirmed.

"Helm shifting to bearing 328º, as marked."

"Steady as she goes," the captain said.

The Argo moved forward at 4 knots towards the target, but this time they were not preparing to fire. They had no intention of destroying the surface ship that lay ahead of them.

"Sonar, any active contacts?" The captain asked.

"No active contacts, Captain. No changes in aspect ratios for any contacts, no prop or plant noises, no active sonar pings, no communications. They are dead in the water."

"Bring us in," the captain ordered.

At 0800 hours local time, the Argo surfaced fifty yards from the USS Harry Truman's stern on the carrier's port side. The bulk of the Truman's carrier group lay to starboard. Beyond them, the USS John Kennedy's carrier group lay a kilometer to the north, and to the east, the Russian fleet drifted. The captain, and three other _chiliarchoi_, climbed to the observation deck atop the sail and surveyed their surroundings through binoculars.

"Com reports nothing ship to ship or on the satellite systems," one remarked.

"The whole fleet has drifted precisely as the _strategos_ calculated. The Gulf Stream and the Westerlies have brought them 250 miles closer to the Azores since December 18th."

"Exactly. None of these ships have been under their own power since the _strategos _killed their crews. I doubt if there's a single living soul onboard any of them."

"I agree," the captain said. "The teams may proceed with the salvage."

Six inflatable Zodiacs launched from the Argo, each carrying a dozen clones. They converged on the USS Harry Truman, tying off to the same ladder that Xena and Prima had descended to the Miss Artiphys by. From the aft hanger deck they spread out through the ship, checking and securing the engineering and navigation sections. Clones invaded the superstructure and operations. They occupied the bridges and control rooms. One by one, they restored functions and powered up systems. The automatic shutdown protocols were reset to restore full power throughout the ship. The clones went about their tasks with knowledge and efficiency, having studied the Truman's schematics that Prima had downloaded from the ship to her laptop back in December.

At 1200 hours, two Zodiacs returned delivering seventeen clones to the sub. The other four Zodiacs were hoisted aboard the Truman and stored in the aft boat hanger. A crew of 55 clones had remained behind to sail the aircraft carrier and dispose of bodies. The Argo stood off from the Truman and floated at station keeping, 100 yards off the carrier's port side. From the observation deck, the captain watched as the mammoth ship's lights came on, its radar dishes spun, and finally, its props began to turn. She received confirmation from the _chiliarchos_ in command of the carrier, reporting that everything was operational and that they were preparing to get underway. Then she watched as the flattop turned southeast, finally coming to 30 knots as it churned away towards the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The remaining 33 clones aboard the Argo secured the sub and submerged, running as a shadow escort for the world's biggest troop transport. In Washington, D.C., the _strategos_ was waiting.

_**March 13, 2006 - Gangplank Marina, Washington, D.C.**_

"Secunda, proceed to the T-slip with your remaining forces." The _strategos'_ order came through her headset.

"Withdrawing all remaining troops," the guardian replied, "our ETA is one hour."

The "special" switched the com channel to speak with the final 800 clones. Over the last week, the army of occupation had withdrawn by companies of 800. They had abandoned their posts, marched to the T-slip at the Gangplank Marina, and boarded either the Miss Artiphys, or the converted Odyssey that she towed. From there, they had been ferried downriver to an assembly point at Cape Charles, Virginia, near Norfolk and the southern terminus of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel. The operation had been going on day and night, with the Miss Artiphys running at 30 knots, as fast as the flat bottomed tourist vessel could be hauled.

For years the Odyssey had plied the Potomac River, allowing upscale tourists to enjoy fine dining as they took in the sites of the Nation's Capitol from the water. Now she was gutted, reduced to a passenger barge capable of carrying 600 troops at a time. It was a tight fit, but no other hull in the area could have held so many souls or been towed so fast. As it was, she'd traded two feet of waterline clearance for the increased stability of an overloaded condition.

The remaining 200 clones in each group had piled aboard the hydrofoil, and the two vessels had sailed downriver as fast as Prima could pilot them. On the return trips, the "special" made almost 40 knots most of the way, allowing the Odyssey to come within a hair's breadth of swamping both ships. Xena had gritted her teeth as she'd watched the flat-bottomed tourist cruiser, with no rudder or draft to speak of, slewing and hydroplaning around each curve as it trailed behind them. She could only trust in the enhanced clone's ability to instantly adjust their speed and course to compensate. It had been a nerve-wracking week.

The last clones occupying the Capitol City converged on Secunda's headquarters in the FBI building. They drew up in ranks and files on the Constitution Ave side and she met them at the entrance to the building's concrete courtyard.

"Everything is ready, Guardian," a clone reported, handing over a small control box.

Secunda took the offered control box and nodded. Then she set off, leading the last of the army to the marina. She didn't look back. The city had been her tour of duty for two years, but she had only caught a handful of glimpses of it before the army had emerged into a deserted necropolis. She had no fondness for it at all. She hung the control box from her duty belt and led the way down 9th St and into the underpass below the mall. When they resurfaced, they were south of L'Enfant Plaza.

Their route took them across the overpass above I-395, then down 9th St SW to Water St and finally the marina. The Miss Artiphys was waiting, and Secunda handed over the control box to her general. Prima was already directing companies to board the two craft.

They moved with the same precision and speed they'd used to accomplish everything else they'd done. Most of the clones knew no other way. It was what they'd been trained for, what they'd experienced since their first minute of consciousness in this life, and it was what they expected. Each did her part. In twenty minutes they were aboard with their gear stowed, and they were casting off the ships' lines for the last time. Prima managed the channel motor, drawing the vessels away from their moorings, then started up the water jets as they entered the channel. She looked over the rows of clones, steady on their feet as the ships gained speed, patiently waiting out the hours of transport. Not a one would think of complaining. Their current situation was simply part of their mission, and though uncomfortable, it would be short-lived in the overall scheme of the campaign. Every one of them had identical memories of enduring much worse.

Hours later the vessels reached Cape Charles at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The clones debarked from the Odyssey and Prima cut the barge loose. On the seaward side of the Bay Bridge's span stood the immense bulk of the aircraft carrier, USS Harry Truman. As the army watched, CVN-75 edged closer and closer to the bridge. To its portside, in the center of the navigation channel, the Argo had surfaced.

"Move everyone onto the northbound lane," the _strategos _ordered.

The two "specials" moved to implement her orders. Soon a line of clones was marching up the bridge towards the southern section of the span where the navigation channel still gave the carrier sufficient depth for her draft. The carrier had moved in so that its acres of deck lay above and adjacent to the bridge. With nearly 80 feet to the waterline, the carrier rose more than 40 feet higher than the bridge's road surface. Although the bridge spanned 17 ½ miles, it ran most of that distance on low trestles barely 40 feet above the water. Shipping normally passed into the bay by sailing over one of the two tunnel sections where the road disappeared below the bay's bed into manmade islands.

Now the Truman's crew had inched the big ship in so close that the flight deck overshadowed the bridge's right hand traffic lane. The acting captain watched the operation from the bridge in the island, almost 120 feet above. As the army massed in ranks, the carrier lowered its three starboard aircraft elevators, leaving a height gap of only eight feet to the bridge. The crew deployed boarding nets from the elevators and the 8,000 clones climbed aboard. It took close to two hours, but no other army could have boarded so quickly under such unconventional circumstances.

Finally the Destroyer's army was aboard. There was some redistribution of personnel between the USS Harry Truman, the Argo, and the Miss Artiphys. Zodiacs flitted between the vessels. The _chiliarchoi _and_ hecatontarches_ distributed themselves among the cloned troops to form the intended chain of command. Two hundred crewed the sub. The _strategos _and her two "specials" went aboard the hydrofoil. The remaining 7,800 troops stayed with their officers aboard the Harry Truman. As dark descended over Cape Charles, the ships weighed their anchors put to sea. The clones were heading back to the Old World to wage war on ground they all remembered intimately. They were returning to the country where the features of the landscape were still the most familiar, back to the lands of their gods where they'd first learned to wage war. Back to where another ancient weapon waited, forgotten.

_**March 25, 2006 - Abu Simbel, Southern Egypt, the Nubian Desert**_

Float, float, float, and roast in the sun. She didn't think she'd ever had such a tan, even during those years of traveling long ago. The Gabrielles self-deprecatingly likened their appearance to the California beachy girls they'd seen somewhere on TV. Bronzed skin, hair bleached almost white, and 16,000 emerald green eyes squinting across the water at the cliffs and the endless sky. They'd been floating down the Nile River for two weeks. It was boring, but far better than the six and a half weeks of walking that they'd endured before that. It had already been a long journey and it wasn't over yet, but once upon a time, each of them had spent a lifetime walking.

Walk, walk, walk, it had gotten old fast. Out of Olduvai Gorge, they'd headed north and then west, on the advice of an ancient village woman who had looked like a dried mummy, bald, wizened, toothless, and burned black by the sun. She'd stood balanced on one leg, adorned with a sprinkling of gold ornaments that seemed to blaze against her ebony skin, and holding a long switch with which to intimidate her dozen goats.

"Hibare. Hujambo," one of the Gabrielles had offered in greeting. The old woman had cackled at her Swahili and then spoken to her in English.

No, she hadn't seen any Xenas, but she did warn them to head west, so that they'd pass south of Lake Victoria rather than walking its northern shore where Mt. Elgon slept. The volcano was evil, she'd declared with certainty, and everyone knew that Ebola and the yammering, flesh-eating spirits lived in its caves. Of course Mt. Elgon was to the lake's northeast. To the lake's northwest lay the Sese Islands, a reputed reservoir of Marburg virus and a suspected original epicenter of AIDS. The Gabrielles had heeded her sage advice and passed south of Lake Victoria.

Their migration had continued into the hilly lands of northern Burundi, staying east of the Mitumba Mountains, walking, walking, walking, gathering whatever they found, killing and eating anything that moved.**** Nowhere had anyone seen a Xena. They'd heard rumors of war in other countries to the north, and there weren't as many TV stations or working cell phones anymore. It had sounded ominous to the blondes as they continued on their walk. And as they had in the distant past, they'd helped the people they'd met along their way.

Digging a new village well had taken them only a few hours. Rebuilding a herder's thorn tree fences had gone just as quickly with so many hands. The same was true of the cinderblocks they'd stacked for a new clinic. One afternoon, the Gabrielles had covered many square miles searching for a lost child before finding him wedged in a hillside crag, unconscious from thirst. They'd woven nets for fishermen and checked a line of snares for a man too sick to feed his family. They'd practiced the herbal medicine and even some simple surgeries that they remembered. Finally, after working their way through Rwanda, they'd found themselves in western Uganda, on the northern shore of Lake Albert. The Gabrielles had reached the head of the White Nile.

For the Gabrielles that hadn't been such a big change. They were still stuck walking for a few hundred more miles. The White Nile began in the highlands with miscellaneous swamps and rapids that continued off and on until they reached Nimule, on the Sudanese border. There the river seemed to make up its mind and continued for the next hundred miles as rapids. At Rejaf the river changed its mind again and became a swampland where the water was topped with masses of floating vegetation. Those swamps continued across the Sudan Plain for the better part of 325 miles. Here and there, sections of the waterway were navigable, and ferries plied the river, crowded to the point of floundering, with people, trade goods, and livestock. The Gabrielles, instinctively trusting their feet, had decided that walking was far safer and wouldn't have boarded one of the ferries even if there had been room. In fact, those conveyances had been dangerously overloaded since their first day in service, even to the point of people cooking their meals over open fires on the roof.

The Gabrielles walked the riverbanks where possible, around the rapids and beside the margins of the swamps, and finally along the questionable "seasonal" road between Bor and Malakal that paralleled a canal. The road actually existed during the dry season, but during the wet season it turned into a 160-mile long morass of mud, slime, and insects.

Like most places they'd seen in Africa, there were always people moving. Almost no one could afford to sit still. Many of them had wares to sell, whether it was fabric, grain, bush meats, spices, livestock, or craft works. The bazaars were mindboggling, but the towns were mostly very poor compared to what the blondes remembered of the modern world. Here they saw poverty, diseases, agriculture, and animal husbandry that hadn't changed since their ancient lives. And all of it was juxtaposed against satellite dishes, laptop computers, cars, sneakers, radios, and colorful modern money.

In the center of one concrete town, they'd spied an elder wearing the baboon skin cape of a shaman, busily making deals on a cell phone. He stood cheek by jowl with a younger man in a business suit who'd turned out to be his son. The son was drinking fermented goat's milk from a gourd, while the shaman was downing a can of Pepsi. Both wore chrome-framed sunglasses, probably Rayban knockoffs made in Taiwan. Both wore sneakers...pink sneakers with the "Hello Kitty" character printed on the sides. A man nearby was casually pulling a Guinea worm from its burrow in his leg and winding it around a stick. Just down the street, a family had dragged their sofa into the road, and sat with their friends in a happy circle surrounding a blind man who was plucking out a jaunty tune on a kora. The itinerant musician was seated on a groundcloth in the most ragged tuxedo the Gabrielles had ever imagined. He was sweating profusely and smiling broadly as he stared at a spot somewhere above the heads of his audience.

The days had passed, and with them, the miles. March had found them in Kusti, in the northern region of the Sudan. The land was underpopulated, for people still feared the small pox plague that had devastated the area in September of 2002. Khartoum was believed cursed and the lands surrounding the Nile were deserted. There the Gabrielles had found abandoned boats and they took to the river.

It was a motley flotilla of ferries, cargo and fishing ships, and pleasure craft. They moved together in an armada. Because the old cataracts along the Nile had been flooded under the reservoirs formed by dams, they could navigate freely downriver. At the Abu Dawn dam they filed into the shipping bypass and continued on their way. The same maneuver was repeated at the dams near Al Begeir, Merowe, and Tageb.

Now the Gabrielle armada was passing the drowned temple site of Abu Simbel and the river had widened to form Lake Nasser, the reservoir behind the Aswan High Dam just above the first cataract. The waters had flooded up to the second cataract where the river had been navigable since antiquity.

On the cliffs above the waterline sat the Temples of Ramesses and Nefertari. Both had been relocated in the 1960s as the reservoir's water level first rose. The Gabrielles had heard of these temples in their original life, but had never seen them. Now they stood at the railings on their assortment of boats, staring upwards as transfixed as any tourists in the last 3,000 years. Every one of them recalled their history lessons.

They had married young, in an arranged ceremony before the pharaoh had come to power. For once, such an arrangement had led to love. Pharaoh Ramesses II had ruled the united northern and southern kingdoms for 67 years, and during the first twenty-four, Queen Nefertari had ruled by his side. Seldom had any Egyptian queen been regarded so highly. Many depictions of Ramesses showed Nefertari with him, in both peace and war, attesting to her status and influence in state and foreign affairs. Many titles had been conferred upon her by her loving king, among them, "Mistress of the South and North", and "Lady of the Two Lands". They were royal titles that paralleled his own, setting her above the other queens in a role as closely approaching equal as the culture of that time could permit to a queen who did not rule in her own name. She'd had personal epithets as well; "Queen of All Lands", "Beloved of Mut", and "Bride of God" among them. And then she had disappeared from history. During the 43 years after her death, no other queen was so honored by Ramesses II. In artwork, no other queen's figure was again painted or carved equal in size to his own. In the Valley of Queens at the Necropolis of Thebes, hers was the finest tomb ever uncovered. To the Gabrielles, it was obvious that the pharaoh's soulmate had been irreplaceable.

Soulmates, she'd thought, who had they truly been, this pharaoh and his queen? Where had their souls come from and where had their afterlife delivered them? Gabrielle had always hoped that they'd been reunited beyond the mortal world and rewarded with bliss.

Here, at Abu Simbel, Ramesses II had built a temple for his queen. He had dedicated it to both Nefertari and Hathor, the Goddess of Love, Fertility, and Women. It was the only known Egyptian temple dedicated jointly to a queen and a goddess, and by doing so, Ramesses had conferred divine status upon his beloved wife. Of the six colossal statues guarding the temple's entrance, four depict Ramesses and two depict Nefertari, but more importantly, the figures are carved the same size, indicating equal importance. And above the doors of Nefertari's temple at Abu Simbel, Ramesses had directed masons to carve his dedication.

_"Ramesses II, he has made a temple, excavated in the mountain, of eternal workmanship, for the Chief Queen Nefertari, Beloved of Goddess Mut, in Nubia, forever and ever...Nefertari...for whose sake, the sun does shine."_ This in a land where the sun was a god.

The inscription was almost 3,300 years old, and the Greeks had known of the temples in antiquity. Mercenaries in the service of Psammetichus, son of Theolces, had carved graffiti on its stones to commemorate their visit some 500 years before Gabrielle's time. By the Roman Era, the words had been regarded as an inspiring testimony to a great love between a king and his queen. To Gabrielle, they had also been an inspiration, a testimony to the possibility of equality between partners...not just rulers, but any lovers. She had found that and more in her relationship with her soulmate. Xena had been everything that Gabrielle had dreamed of as a young girl with a head full of legends, myths, and stories, back in Poteidaia. She'd been heroic, dauntless, devoted, and wise. But Xena had also been bound by a dark heredity that coursed through her very blood. Xena had loved Gabrielle as truly as Ramesses had loved Nefertari, but the warrior had also needed her light and her love as truly as Egypt had needed the sun and the river.

The Gabrielles turned their eyes from the temples as they shrank in the distance. The need to find Xena was stronger than ever...not just for the sake of her own desires, but for the sake of Xena's soul. And, the Gabrielles thought, for the sake of the world.

_**April 12, 2006 - Kavala, Macedonia**_

The army of the Destroyer of Nations had debarked and set up a temporary encampment to the west of the small seaside town of Kavala. Eion, the ancient town at the mouth of the Strymon was long gone, and the river's mouth had ceased to be navigable centuries ago. Now it was a swampy estuary rather than an open channel, and even ships of shallow draught could never have sailed upriver to the site where Amphipolis had once stood. Even using Kavala's docks, landing the troops had taken most of a day, ferrying them from the USS Harry Truman in zodiacs, longboats, and the Miss Artiphys.

During the passage across the Atlantic Ocean, through the Strait of Gibraltar, and across the Mediterranean Sea, the clones had been busy. They'd spent the time drilling on the aircraft carrier's deck, converting shipboard weapons for deployment by ground troops, and planning alternative tactics. They had taken the ship's stores, medical supplies, survival equipment, and linens to provision the army.

The day before the ships had reached their destination, the Miss Artiphys had disappeared for half a day with the _strategos_ and her "specials". The hydrofoil had come to the island of Thasos that the Destroyer had sacked in 77 BC. Now there was no Caesar, nor the triremes of the Roman navy. This time her intention was not destruction, but shopping. The clone had procured three goats for "ceremonial" purposes.

"Every army should have goats," she'd declared to Prima. "It was SOP in ancient times. No army would've thought of goin' to war without asking for the blessing of the gods."

"But you already enjoy that favor, _Strategos_," the "special" had observed.

"I know," Xena had said, "and even back then, it was done mostly for the morale of the troops. I never believed that the gods could be so easily influenced. Still, in this campaign, I intend to follow the old forms and rituals of war. It's symbolic of a return to Ares' way...our way." The "specials" had nodded in agreement.

Secunda had helped Xena drag the reluctant animals aboard the hydrofoil and Prima had set their course to return to the fleet. In a couple of hours they'd been back escorting the Truman around Mt. Athos on the easternmost peninsula of Chalcidice. And later....

"See that coastal highway," the _strategos_ said, indicating a four-lane asphalt road that ran right along the cliffs above the shore for the last twenty miles to the mouth of the Strymon River. Prima and Secunda nodded, yes. "Have it destroyed. It's a back route right to our doorstep." The modern highway, E90, closely followed the same route the Spartans had taken to assault Amphipolis in 424 BC, during the Peloponnesian War.

Secunda picked up the radio headset and contacted the Harry Truman. She spoke to the acting captain and then shut the transceiver down. Aboard the carrier, clones quickly moved to follow Xena's orders. From the portside stern, just below the flight deck, four con trails marked the shrieking passage of a volley of Sea Sparrow missiles. The missiles struck their target, an overpass bridging a narrow streambed that drained the southern highlands of Chalcidice into the sea. Two hit the pilings supporting the span at either end, the other two struck the road surface as it left solid ground. The explosions sent up a cloud of dirt and debris, and when that had cleared, the clones could see that the eighty-foot span had been breached, leaving a cliff-walled gorge nearly a hundred feet deep. The missile battery's crew moved to reload the Sea Sparrow launcher.

After the clones debarked, the USS Harry Truman had remained at anchor off Kavala. It was still a functional battle platform with its full air wing. Below the flight deck were massive tanks of untainted aviation fuel and countless airborne ordinance. The onboard Sea Sparrow defensive missiles were fully functional, but the clones had removed the two .50 caliber machine guns from the bow, and the four stripped down M-61A1 Gatling guns from the Phalanx systems. They had taken all the available infantry munitions, the charges from a score of 500lb bombs, and some massive batteries. Before leaving, they also rigged several booby traps in case of a hostile boarding attempt.

On the morning following their encampment, Xena reviewed the clones. For the first time her army stood complete, arrayed in companies as if on parade. The _strategos_ faced her troops. Before her stood the two "specials", ten paces away. Behind them stood the eight corps, each of a thousand clones, each with their _chiliarchos_ front and center, six paces ahead of their ranks. At the head of each of the eighty files, one of the _hecatontarchea_ stood two paces forward All the clones, from the _strategos_ to her regulars wore uniforms of identical black woven body armor. They bore identical weapons...sword, dagger, and chakram, with the single exception of Xena, who carried the plain ring of the Chakram of Day, rather than a Combined Chakram with the s-curve across its center. And each of the 8,088 clones in the regular army bore an assault rifle and a sidearm. Today, both "specials" bore the paired Glock 18 pistols. All stood at attention, silent and unmoving as statues; even their lungs rose and fell in a unison of shallow coordinated breaths.

Twenty feet behind the Destroyer of Nations, a small pyre had been laid and doused with oil. Beside it, a torch stood ready. Halfway between the Hellene's Bane and the pyre stood a waist high flat rock, a perfect natural altar.

Between Xena and her two enhanced clones stood a cage that held the three goats. The _strategos_ paced forward and dragged one from among its companions. She hauled the reluctant beast back to her station before the army, and clamped it immobile between her knees. Then she called out to her god as the hoplites of Sparta had done a millennium and a half before her time.

_"Blood shed in token of bloodshed to come,_

_Flesh offered in promise of enemy's flesh._

_Life ended in token of lives to be taken in battle,_

_A spirit given in promise of spirits defeated._

_God of War, Mentor in Courage, _

_Patron of Soldiers, Teacher of Prowess,_

_Accept this sacrifice, bled in your name,_

_Gift your Blessing to this army, _

_Ares, Slayer of Enemies."_

In a single swift movement, Xena hauled back the goat's head, drew the Chakram of Day, and slit its throat. The animal convulsed as its blood fountained out in an arc that spattered the ground between the Destroyer of Nations and her army. The arterial font pulsed, then faltered, and finally stopped as the animal went limp between the general's knees. She wiped the chakram clean on its belly fur before replacing the weapon on her belt clip. Finally, she took the carcass to the flat rock and butchered it, separating the flanks from the carcass and setting the meat on the pyre. She lit the oil soaked wood with the torch. Then she returned to her place before the army and waited as the smoke and flames rose to the heavens. Not a soul moved.

The flash of blue light flared into the space between Xena and her army. It flashed so brightly on that day that the shadows of the front ranks danced as they flickered across the faces of those standing behind. Ares appeared before his Favorite without a direct summons, and stood before her army in acceptance of the sacrifice. His eyes flicked to the pyre and he nodded in appreciation at Xena's adherence to the old ways. It had been a very long time since a warrior had beseeched him for his favor. It had been a very long time since a Favorite had asked for his Blessing. Though not a single clone moved, the collective relief and awe that radiated from them could be felt as a tingling charge that raised the hair. Though each had awakened with memories of the God of War, only Prima had actually seen him in this life. His presence now was the confirmation that their existance was all they remembered it to be and that the promised future would come. They believed in their destiny, every single one of them.

Ares looked at his Chosen, realizing that for the first time she stood at the head of an army that did her justice. The faintest of grins curled his lips. Then he turned and viewed the army, slowly nodding in approval as his eyes seemed to count each soldier as an individual. Each felt as if she had been inspected and had passed muster by her god. In their hearts, each felt a warmth; the closest thing they could feel to an upwelling of human pride.

The God of War turned back to his Favorite again and moved to stand before her, just a half-pace away. For a long moment he stared eye to eye with her, neither of them blinking, neither moving a muscle, with their senses open and focused, searching. And then, with the entire army as a witness, he leaned across the space between them and gently kissed her on the lips, a gesture symbolic of his Blessing.

"Just like old times, Xena," he said softly for her ears alone, "as it should have been."

They shared a sad smile before he withdrew and turned again to face the massed troops.

"On this day you prepare to wage war, and the war you will wage has been an eon in coming," he announced. "Now the old contest will finally be laid to rest. The nature of combat will be decided. To this army I give my Blessing. With this army I will stand in victory or fall in defeat. There can be only one Conqueror, and there can be only one God of War."

And the voices of the 8,090 clones rose in a spontaneous response, for each felt what her sister clones felt, and thought what her sister clones thought, and all of them clove to the will of the _strategos_.

"In the name of the Destroyer of Nations, with the Blessing of the God of War...Victory or death!"

The God of War raised his right hand, and on each uniform throughout the army, two tokens materialized in crackling flashes of blue light. On the right shoulders of each clone, embroidered in gold, the Lion of Amphipolis appeared. On their left collars, emblazoned in blood red, the Sigil of War appeared. Alone among all the Xenas, on the right collar of the Destroyer of Nations, the ring of the Chakram of Day appeared in silver.

Ares turned back to face his Favorite and gave her a brief smile as he lifted a hand and touched the special emblem with a fingertip.

"Just so I can tell the real you, Xena," he whispered, "another weapon."

The God of War vanished as he had appeared, in crackling flashes of blue light.

Another weapon, the Destroyer of Nations agreed, as she watched from her place beside Secunda, another weapon indeed. She wondered if Prima felt any different now.

_**The Aether - Timeless**_

_"Once the world would have trembled at what transpired..."_

_"...but now it dies in ignorance..."_

_"...and yet in ignorance it shall rejoice..."_

_"...for darkness lies deepest just ere dawn..."_

_"...when Phosphor signals with his lonely light..."_

_"...and Helios proffers tidings of blood."_

_"But She has watched, and She will come..."_

_"...and with the blindness of Wisdom's pride..."_

_"...find Her destiny in the dawn."_

_**April 13, 2006 – The Strymon Vale – Macedonia**_

Following the sacrifice and the Blessing by Ares, Xena had ordered the army to march to the Strymon. They had reached the river's mouth in the mid-afternoon. Another hour's march north brought them to a curve in the river where the highlands closed on the eastern shore. A bluff overshadowed the banks and cliffs receded as they ran to the north. From them a narrow gully opened, delivering the flow of a small tributary stream.

This had been the site of Amphipolis in ancient times. Now the home of the Warrior Princess lay buried beneath two millennia of sediment. Not a shaped block or remnant of her stonework remained. The land was devoid of any evidence of occupation. History had erased Amphipolis, just as it had long ago erased the memory of Xena.

The army made it's camp on either side of the river, which in these later days was merely a shallow stream during the dry season. They pitched tents, set pickets, and dug waste pits. But the Destroyer of Nations set her command tent upon the bluff, where she could overlook the encampment from what would have been her _polis'_ main gate.

The tent mirrored the room that had been the soulmates' study back in Columbia. Her map table had been set to the right of the entry flap, her chair behind it three swords' lengths from the wall. It was prudence, and a habit that had been imitated by a host of later commanders, friend and foe alike. Here she spread her maps and contemplated the campaign to come, and here she called the _synedrion_, the meeting of the commanders.

Only hours after the camp was set, as the Apollo's chariot rode down the sky to the horizon, she called a detail of six clones to her for a special mission. She remembered this place as the border between ancient Thrace and Macedonia, but over time, names and borders had changed. They were now in modern Macedonia where her story in modern times had begun. She had read Janice and Melinda's expedition notes years ago, and she had forgotten nothing. She laid a file on her table and opened it to a hand drawn map.

"_Praipositos_," she addressed a clone at random, naming her commander of the mission detail, "you will lead your sisters to the position marked on this map. Take charges and if necessary, blast your way in...carefully. You are to enter this ruin and locate the tomb within it. There you will recover a weapon and deliver it to me."

She handed over the map and a drawing, and the clone nodded her understanding.

"_Strategos_," the newly chosen _praipositos_ asked, "are there any special precautions or dangers in this mission?" She had Xena's memories and she had a suspicion.

"Funny you should ask," Xena said with the hint of a grin, "there is only a single special requirement. You must maintain absolute secrecy from mortal and immortal alike. This object may be our only insurance of surviving our eventual victory."

_As I lay me down to sleep  
This I pray  
That you will hold me dear  
Though I'm far away  
I'll whisper your name into the sky  
And I will wake up happy_

_(Partial lyric from, _"As I Lay Me Down"_, ©1994, Sophie B. Hawkins)_

_**April 15, 2006 - Damietta, Egypt, the Nile Delta**_

Some of the Gabrielles stood on a quay staring north, looking out at the blue expanse of the Mediterranean Sea. Their ragtag armada had arrived in Damietta two days before, in the morning, just as the sun was clearing the horizon. Damietta was only about 40 miles from the mouth of the Suez Canal; much closer to it than to the gaping crater that had been Alexandria, 115 miles to the west. The two cities stood on opposite sides of the Nile Delta, though neither actually occupied the very margins of the fertile area.

The city of Damietta was only sparsely populated now, for the majority of its people had fled in terror, shortly after the New Years Day attack on Alexandria. Most had assumed that the nuclear blast had been the work of the Israelis up the coast to the east. They had the bombs, and they had a history of grievances. It had been over a week before word had reached Egypt that the Israeli city of Tel Aviv had also been destroyed at the same time. Even then, most of the citizens had assumed that the Jewish state would blame them and retaliate. It was the conditioning of long habit that had caused them to continue to flee. In fact, the Israelis were too busy exterminating the last few hundred Palestinians left in the West Bank, (whom they did blame), to bother with Egypt...yet.

The hodge-podge flotilla had run out of gasoline. Boat after boat had heard its engine sputter and die for lack of fuel. It had begun only shortly downriver from Khartoum, near the city of Sandi. One by one, the stricken vessels had been lashed together to become a train of barges. The decreasing number with working engines had pulled the rest until the last had coughed and given up near al-Uqsur, (Luxor). The Gabrielles had shaken their heads in stoic acceptance and floated downstream with the current, carefully manning their rudders to stay in the center of the river. Nowhere had they encountered anyone with gasoline. A fisherman in a reed boat that looked like it had come straight out of a tomb mural had excitedly explained that the gas had all turned into water.

_(Technically the gas hadn't actually turned into water. Mostly, the hydrocarbons had degenerated into carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and some sulfur...predictably enough, although a percentage had been reorganized into more nanobots.) Editor_

Upon their arrival, the Gabrielles had quickly noticed the empty streets, empty docks, and empty marketplaces. They'd also noticed the empty ships. Since they didn't expect to find gas, they'd searched for the next best thing...boats with sails. Mostly what they found were small boats, fishing craft and yachts, but there were enough of them that the Gabrielles were able to pack themselves aboard. For once they were happy to be small. When they'd finally managed to fit their numbers onto the wind-powered crafts, they realized that they'd be every bit as overcrowded as the ferries on the White Nile had been in the Sudan. More than one of them wondered if they'd end up cooking their meals over fires on the roof.

Now the Gabrielles who stood staring out to sea commented among themselves, agreeing that they had to make their way north across the water. They'd become convinced that the pull each of them felt had been leading them toward their soulmate, and by extension it seemed, to their ancient homeland of Greece. They'd guessed that much already, remembering that Xena had been intending to go to war. A general would want the advantage of campaigning on familiar ground, and Greece was familiar to both Xena and Athena. The Gabrielles wondered if their course would lead them to Athens, which they guessed would be Athena's choice for a battlefield, or to Thrace, which they suspected Xena would favor. Given Xena's past history, perhaps she'd even choose the very battlefield where she'd arranged the destruction of Caesar and Pompey's armies on the summer solstice in 63 BC.

The Gabrielles had no idea that Athens had been destroyed. They had no idea that Europe lay decimated by cruise missiles and plagues. That knowledge wouldn't have stopped them in any case. They would get back aboard their ships, set sail across the Mediterranean Sea, and follow the mysterious urging in their souls that had directed them more reliably than any compass. It had already drawn them here, 4,500 miles from Olduvai Gorge.

Still, sailing had never been their favorite pastime. It wasn't because of the seasickness that the TV show had presented as a comic detail. It was the uncertainty of being on the water where landmarks were few and far between. Gabrielle had always liked to know where she was. This would be very different from floating down the Nile, where they could see the cliffs on either side, and swim to shore in an emergency. Now every one of them was nervous, and they traded nervous smiles and softly spoken words of reassurance. It would be another leap of faith. They would set out tomorrow, after a good night's sleep and a decent supper.

_**April 21, 2006 - The Strymon Vale, Macedonia**_

"Any word from the scouts, Prima?" The _strategos _asked.

Xena was holding the morning _synedrion,_ the meeting of her commanders, and hearing the scouting reports from the _kataskopoi_.

"Nothing to the south, _Strategos_," Prima reported, "the sea and the coast are clear."

After the sacrifice and the Blessing, one of Xena's first orders had been to capture 100 horses. When that had been done, she'd mounted 80 scouts and sent them in roving companies up the vale to the north, and both east and west along the coast. Another 200 scouts on foot patrolled the highlands to either side of the Strymon River. They moved with Amazon stealth, and unlike the scouts of a modern army, everywhere they went they collected herbs as well as information.

"And to the north?"

"The vale is quiet for 60 miles,_ Strategos_, as are the highlands to the west, however signs have been seen to the east." At a nod from her general, the "special" elaborated. "Overnight, the _kataskopoi_ east of Drama noted lights, silhouetting a ridge and reflected off the clouds, down in the further valley of the river Nestos. The waters downstream were muddied and they also report hearing the faint sounds of machines. This morning, just past daybreak, there was a scattering of birds and the renewed sounds of machinery. During the night, a company of scouts had moved towards the disturbance and should be reporting soon."

The Destroyer of Nations had been pinpointing the area on a map and now she smiled. It was at least a segment of Athena's army; she was sure of it. And with even greater clarity than in her original life, she could foresee Athena's strategy. They were almost certainly heading up the Nestos river valley, hoping to cross the highlands in secret and come down the Strymon from the north, intending to drive her into the sea. But they had been discovered. Their element of surprise was lost. Surely they moved with all the stealth of a modern army, which, she thought, was without stealth at all. They'd thought it safe to use lights, while her scouts moved through the darkness, marching from cold camps and remaining silent and invisible like the Amazons of old. Athena's warriors were unable to abandon their machines, and their goddess her technology.

"Shadow 'em," she ordered, "and expect similar movements in Chalcidice. Athena will try to flank us from the west as her force attacks from the north. I suspect at dawn in three days. Tonight, we move with 4,000 to destroy the force in the east. 4,000 will remain to hold the Strymon and destroy those in the west. Ready the troops."

The two "specials" and the eight _chiliarchoi_ nodded in assent and left the tent to carry out her orders. Alone now, Xena returned her attention to the map while idly fingering the silver chakram emblem on her collar. She had marked nothing on the map, not even with pins or loose tokens. She never had in all her years in the field. No spy had ever gleaned any insight into her strategies by glancing at her maps. It was a lesson she'd learned early on from Mithridates.

_"A good general fights the campaign in his head long before taking the field. Politics and war counter-train the mind for each other. In neither case should a plan be visible. In neither case should the whole strategy be shared. A kingdom can have only one king, and a war only one victor."_

By modern standards the King of Pontus would have been considered a paranoid sociopath with grandiose tendencies. By the standards of his time he'd been considered a crafty general and a deadly enemy. To Xena, he'd been a good teacher and an inspiring mentor. His lessons had given her the practical groundwork to successfully wage war, and she had avenged him on that bloody vernal equinox in 58 BC. She returned her concentration to the map.

Here, Xena thought, eyeing a pass in the eastern mountains where a tributary of the Strymon River turned southwest towards Seres...and here, she saw in her mind's eye the lands of Chalcidice, north of Lake Bolbe. The modern map showed a paved road from Thessaloniki, (which she remembered as Therme), and she felt confident that Athena would use it. Over 2,000 years before there had already been a dirt track in that very same place; a rural road used mostly by shepherds and traders. Her own army had used it many times for their cavalry, but her footmen had spread out for miles on either side to secure their passage. Would Athena's clones be as careful? She wondered.

The modern road was joined by a spur at a spot between and to the north of Lakes Koroneia and Bolbe, at a town called Sohos. It was about 10 leagues from Amphipolis, safely distant. She could force an approaching army off the main road and onto the spur, and then demolish them in the narrows between the two lakes.

On her table sat a small console from the USS Truman's fire control, and the control box that Secunda had given to her in Washington, D.C. They brought another concern to her mind. Should she commit a force to counter yet another option that she herself would have exercised had she been assaulting her own position? Would Athena divide her forces thrice? The Destroyer of Nations gave it serious thought. Do not underestimate her, she warned herself, nor overestimate yourself. The words of her patron god came to her mind. _Make no mistake, Favorite. You are facing a goddess, and that enemy is the Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare. She was once Strategos Hypatos to Zeus himself and all of Olympus._

Very well, Xena thought, and whispered, "No victory comes from an unused weapon, but excess is acceptable in war." They would come from the south as well. She walked around her table and out of the tent.

From the top of the Amphipolitan hill the Destroyer surveyed her troops' deployment. The river seemed so small now in comparison to the river that ran in her memory. Today it was little more than a shallow stream of 30 yards' width, capable of being forded in most places on foot. It was worthless as a defensive element and useless for offense as well. In her time, she could have dammed it and then released the waters to flood the better part of the vale between the city and the coast. Now, not only was the river no longer navigable, but it passed far too little volume. Worse, Lake Cercinitis, the natural reservoir she'd known to the north, had silted up centuries ago. Now most of its original area was either fields or swamps. Like the coastal Narrows of Trachis, its strategic value had disappeared.

Xena continued to survey her army. Its encampment lay on both sides of the modern river, with tents, pickets, and gear extending a furlong in each direction. Those clones not on duty sat working on a project she had ordered; that each of them exercise their skills as bowyers and fletchers, and fabricate a _toxon_ and a dozen arrows, now that they had native wood to work. At the same time, the scouts were collecting the herbs to brew poisons for the Pharmacopoeia of War.

Below her on the nearer bank stood five carts, each to be drawn by a pair of horses. Her eyes sought an officer and she put her fingers to her mouth, producing a sharp clear whistle. The _chiliarchos _looked up at the sound and the Destroyer summoned her with a gesture. The clone responded without hesitation, leaving her task and hastening to join her general.

In the tent with the commander of a thousand, Xena pointed to her map, indicating a bay on the southwest coast of the island of Thasos, only 42 miles from the mouth of the Strymon River.

"One of your _hecatontarches_ is to take her hundred to the docks at Kavala. They're to board the Argo and the Miss Artiphys, an' put to sea. The Argo is to remain hidden on the south side of Thasos. The Miss Artiphys will hide in the bay to the island's southwest. Two days from now they should see ships sailing to take the Strymon an' hold it against us. Follow 'em with stealth in the Miss Artiphys. They'll approach and board the Harry Truman near Kavala. When they do, defend it as long as possible, then run out at flank speed to a distance of at least eight miles, an' use this." She handed the small console to the officer. "They're not to stop until they rendezvous with the Argo."

The _chiliarchos_ nodded to her general, then took the console and left the tent. Xena intended to protect her vessels and strike a blow against Athena's forces. The carrier was too big to hide, and if she were correct, wouldn't be needed again. But it was also a capital ship, a threat and a prize, and it would be irresistible to her enemy's warriors. Thousands could hide aboard the CVN-75. At the very least, Athena's soldiers would have to check to make sure it didn't contain a den of enemies at their back. They could not afford to ignore it, but they would be on a schedule and the search would require many troops if it were to be done quickly. Though only a fraction of Athena's landing force would actually board the Truman, the Destroyer of Nations intended to kill them all. She too could not afford to leave an enemy at her back.

As the day wore on, the army prepared to move. Xena met with the commanders and refined her plans. In the mid-afternoon, Secunda took command of 3,000 clones, and with their officers and four carts, she made her way west into the highlands of Chalcidice. Their column traveled up the paved road after crossing the Strymon River, rounding a northeast curve and finally disappearing into the higher ground leading toward Sohos.

The 4,044 troops who were to march north up the Strymon Vale readied their gear and then gathered at 1600 hours for an early mess. They would march through the night on filled stomachs, under the command of the Destroyer of Nations. Xena expected to reach Seres, twenty-two miles upriver, by 0100 hours, and would then move up the valley toward the Nestos for another four hours. It would be a long march, but nothing the clones weren't capable of. After a five-hour break for rest and food, during which Xena would hear more reports from the scouts, she would move her troops into position.

At 1600 hours while the troops ate, Xena met with the remaining commanders over a meal to hear the afternoon reports. During the day, the scouts had come within sight of the enemy and were shadowing their march. One had ridden back to report.

It was as their _strategos_ had predicted. Their best estimates numbered 12,000 troops, all identical clones of Achilles. They were moving northward up the Nestos at an even pace, with less speed than they were capable of. Xena smiled at this confirmation of her strategic insight. The column was moving according to a timetable and its pace was coordinated with the movements of other bodies of troops. She would have time to move into position and neutralize them as an independent force. In her mind's eye she reviewed the terrain of the valley northeast of Seres.

In her time it had been rough upland country, sparsely populated by sheepherders, and containing the closest of the Pangaion gold mines. These had been a factor in the Athenians' original desire to colonize the area, but they had been mostly played out by the Roman era. More importantly, the lands between the Strymon and the Nestos provided some excellent opportunities for ambush.

"Where'll the enemy be by mid-afternoon tomorrow?" Xena asked.

The scout searched the map, added the time and figured a position on the Nestos.

"I believe they'll camp here tonight, _Strategos_, and begin moving towards the tributary in the morning. They've begun their marches in the second hour after dawn and should reach here," she indicated a spot near the head of the Strymon's southwest bound tributary, "by mid-afternoon tomorrow."

"They must cross the high pass here," Xena predicted, pointing to the ridge that separated the watersheds of the Nestos and the Strymon. "Remember how it only allowed four horsemen abreast?" Each clone in the tent searched her memories and saw the place in her mind's eye. The eastern side was a steep-sided defile with a seasonal stream, which narrowed uphill and crested the ridge at the pass. Xena continued. "We'll move into positions here, here, and here," she indicated the slopes to either side above the road through the pass, and a place around a bend downslope from it, "and we'll allow 'em to enter the pass before we attack. We'll have to kill any flankers on the slopes. After that it should be easy to slaughter those already in the pass. Then we can move the gun up and assault the rest from the high ground with our flanks protected. It'll be almost impossible for 'em to reverse their march quickly in the confines up there. I expect to kill two-thirds of 'em."

She gave the cold-hearted appraisal in a matter-of-fact voice, and the other clones accepted it as they too calculated the probable casualties. 8,000 dead was reasonable.

"What of the other third, _Strategos_?" Prima asked.

"Let 'em run," Xena sneered, "just like some in Chalcidice probably will. The survivors will reform and we'll slaughter 'em later. I have foreseen it."

The declaration silenced everyone in the tent. She was their _strategos hypatos_, their supreme commander, but more importantly, she was the Favorite of the God of War. Every one of them understood this. She had been gifted with a vision of the future, of the battle to come, and in it, they had been victorious. The clones believed. They had been created to achieve this vision. The acceptance of such portents was ingrained in their ancient souls, and they had seen the God of War give the army his Blessing.

"No sign of Athena?" Xena asked, just to be sure.

"The enemy bears her tokens of the owl and the Medusa's head, but her presence has not been sensed, _Strategos_."

Xena nodded to the scout. It was no more or less than she'd expected.

At 1800 hours they set out up the Strymon Vale. Xena had left Prima with the least dangerous command assignment, in charge of the remaining clones in Amphipolis. Then she marched north on foot at the head of her troops, while at the rear of the column came a horse-drawn cart. They took the modern road, which traced the same curves that she remembered had twisted the northbound way 2,000 years before. It had already been over 300 years old at the time of her birth, but that ancient road had itself followed a track that had been trod by men and beasts back into the shadows of the Neolithic. For almost 8,000 years, people had moved north and south along the Strymon, hunter/gatherers, herdsmen, miners, settlers, and warriors. She had marched this way before, leading an army more than once. Each of them had.

As darkness descended at 1940 hours, Xena noted the increasing wetness of the land west of the road to her left. She also noted the rising land closing in to her right. A chill went down her spine as the topography became familiar. Yes, she had been here 2,000 years ago, but she had been here more recently than that.

The column crested a rise and the landscape revealed itself. The road bent northwest for a stretch and there was a wide gap in the highlands where a tributary poured out its lazy flow from the east. Its valley was lit by the last light of the setting sun, as it would be lit by the first rays of morning. A high hill stood out from the valley facing darkening fields to the west. Beyond that field lay a wide swamp where the tributary's waters stagnated. Cliffs marched northwest in an unbroken arc beyond the tributary, hemming in the field and the road. Their black igneous surface was tinged with bloody hues as Helios sank in the west, while collected at their feet lay the blocks and talus that had sheared from their face. After a league the cliffs failed and shrank to a more moderately sloping incline. Xena realized that the massive swamp had once been the bed of Lake Cercinitis, and the fields now hid its shoreline. The hands of time had resculpted the land. What had been a favorite Amphipolitan fishing and swimming site had become the site of a future battle. Yes she had foreseen it, in Ares' vision over four years ago. With her unnaturally sharp recall she recognized it as if it had been yesterday.

The Destroyer's army reached the small city of Seres at 0015 hours, 45 minutes ahead of schedule, and took a short break. Xena ordered the citizens she met to stay away and the people hid in their homes. She had made no effort to hide her troops, all of whom looked identically alike, and all of whom were heavily armed. It was like an invasion out of a science fiction movie to the civilians, and it was utterly terrifying. The army occupied a block of land outside the city, beside the tributary running down from the north. Since they were ahead of their timetable, they posted sentries and rested. During that time, Xena heard updated reports from the scouts.

"_Strategos, _the enemy's progress today was as expected and they have been encamped since 1730 hours," a scout said. At a questioning glance from Xena she pointed out the location on the map.

"Excellent," Xena remarked, "right on schedule."

Her forces would be in place with time to spare. More importantly, the enemy forces in Chalcidice would be moving on a coordinated timetable. Their progress and position would be predictable based on their intention of trapping Xena's army. The timeframe would allow Secunda to set up her offensive according to Xena's plan. It would also give the Miss Artiphys and the Argo time to move into position.

"Still no sign of the Goddess of War?"

"None."

"Then return to your post. Send word immediately if ya suspect her presence or if there any are other changes."

"Yes, _Strategos_," the scout said before turning and leaving the tent.

"She could change everything by directly aiding her army," one of the _chiliarchoi_ observed.

"If she did, then she'd be escalating the war," Xena told her. "By actin' in person without mankind's declared devotion, she'd be breaking an ancient pact of non-interference that's been in force since mankind ceased worshippin' the Olympians...and then she'd have to accept Ares' direct intervention. Maybe other gods too."

The officers gave this information their attention. They searched their memories but found nothing to directly confirm or refute Xena's claims. Still they accepted her word. She was their _strategos hypatos_, and the Chosen of the God of War.

"So you don't expect her to appear," the _chiliarchos_ said.

"No," Xena answered, "I do expect her eventually...in fact, I'm counting on it."

At 0100 hours the clones broke camp and moved up the valley. They marched along a dirt road that became a dirt track after the first seven miles. At 0415 hours the dirt track narrowed to a path. Xena ordered the contents of the cart unloaded and distributed among the clones who would work in shifts hauling two .50 caliber machine guns, the M-61A1, their ammunition, and several hundred pounds of batteries. The horses were left to graze free. They promptly lay down and went to sleep.

The army continued to march on through the darkness. Xena was impressed. In her memory, all the armies that she'd led had slowed down by increasing increments as they continued uphill. The decrease in speed was related to the length of their march, the steepness of the grade, and the their general morale. An uphill march at night would have been testy. Out of habit, Xena had calculated these factors into her timetable. What she hadn't expected was that she was leading an army of clones of herself who didn't react to any of those factors. There was no stumbling, cursing, or lagging. They continued at the original pace she'd set, and she, sensing no fatigue on their part that she didn't feel herself, maintained her pace. In that way, they covered almost fifteen uphill miles by 0500. At that point, Xena called a halt. The army set up a guarded cold camp and the clones ate and rested. Again, Xena heard updated reports from her scouts.

"Nothing moves in the enemy's camp," a scout reported. "There have been no changes."

"Very well," Xena replied, "return to your post."

Outside, the camp was nearly silent, more so than with any army Xena had led. Most of the clones had simply lain down with their weapons close at hand and fallen asleep. The sentries, of course, were silent and hidden. In their black uniforms, the area looked deserted to the casual eye. Only by concentrating hard and knowing that 4,044 troops were nearby, could Xena barely discern bodies at rest among the shadows.

"An enemy could almost walk through this camp and be none the wiser," a _chiliarchos_ whispered from her side. Her tone wasn't prideful, merely observant.

"We could make that a certainty," Xena whispered back. Her focused senses reported that several nearby clones had awoken at the officer's soft voice and now lay with slitted eyes observing them.

"I calculate that we'll reach the pass by 1300 hours, _Strategos_," the commander of a thousand said.

"I agree," Xena replied, "now let's get some sleep."

At 0930 hours the clones awakened, ate their morning rations, and resumed their march. During the morning, the enemy column had begun its march at the same 0800 hours that had been their starting time for the last two days. The scouts reported no unexpected developments.

At 1310 hours the cloned army reached the pass. Xena ordered the placement of her troops and they deployed rapidly. A scout materialized and reported that only in the last hour had they been forced to kill several advanced scouts from the enemy's army to maintain security in the pass. Incredible, Xena thought, they're only ranging three hours ahead of the main force. They may as well be walking blind.

"And blind they will be," the Destroyer of Nations whispered. She gave a whistle that imitated the call of a hawk; then lowered a filter over her left eye that enhanced her vision into the infrared. Across the high ground surrounding the pass, another 4,044 clones did the same thing. The army vanished. They had activated the outermost layer of their laminated uniforms, the "chameleon cloth". Photoelectric cells powered sensors that sampled the environment, and microprocessors conformed the mimetic pigmentation cells on the uniforms' opposite side to the sampled data for chroma, hue, value, and density. Each clone could see the thermal image of her invisible sisters with her left eye, and they could see what their enemies saw with their right. When they moved, a slight lag between sampling and miming gave the appearance of a subtle ripple against the background, as if a heat wave were every so lightly distorting the landscape. Only their shadows and uncloaked equipment remained unchanged.

1445 hours arrived and the clones heard the first signs of the approaching army. Soon there was noticeable movement among the trees downslope, the aggregate sound of footfalls, the faint noise of motors, and the telltale glints of reflections off of metal. Xena's clones froze in place, weapons held behind their backs. No telltale movement of their shadows or uncloaked rifles would reveal their presence. They watched, hidden in plain sight by their mimetic uniforms; every eye trained on the path leading up to the pass. On the high ground, and on the slopes above and to the east of the pass, there was nothing to be seen at all. It would be a perfect ambush.

_**April 22,2006 - Sohos, Chalcidice**_

Secunda and her company had arrived in the town of Sohos at 2210 hours on April 21st, having covered the twenty-two miles from Amphipolis in a seven-hour march. Their way had begun uphill from the Strymon Vale on a two-lane asphalt road that followed a streambed, and the land had become progressively drier.

In the highlands of Chalcidice, scrubby trees and brush grew on pale soil laced with chips of limestone and sandstone. After a league, they'd made a descent to an interior plateau while the light had faded into evening. There in the creeping darkness, Secunda had noted large areas where only tall coarse grass seemed to grow, just high enough to hide boulders. She'd observed everything with rapid flicks of her eyes, weighing the potential benefits and liabilities. Throughout the march, she'd been receiving regular reports from the scouts already roaming the interior of Chalcidice.

The road had finally led Secunda into Sohos, a sleepy settlement of roughly 1,300 souls. With her were 3,033 heavily armed clones in black uniforms, eight horses, and four carts. All the soldiers wore the same cold face. It was a nightmarish invasion that had descended upon the small town in the dead of night. The people of Sohos had panicked. Some had tried to flee. The guardian had ordered them hunted down and the population rounded up. No distinction was made between those who had run and those dragged from their beds. The "special" had found the next requirement distasteful. It had consumed yet more valuable time.

"Kill 'em all," she'd ordered four _hecatontarches_, adding, "quietly."

There'd been no dissent. The commanders of a hundred had nodded in understanding. Secunda didn't want to waste ammunition or announce their presence with gunfire. They'd marshaled their troops and drawn swords. The doomed people had screamed, cried, and begged for mercy. The clones had none to give. They'd all understood the necessity of the guardian's orders. Sohos lay adjacent to tomorrow's battlefield. She couldn't afford to have their presence betrayed to her enemies. In a half-hour of grisly bladework they'd executed every man, woman, and child. Soon the streets had lain unnaturally quiet under the blessed stars.

But Secunda and her clones didn't stay. Instead they'd rested, eaten, and then marched to the crossroads. There a gravel track made its dead end intersection with the paved two-lane. It was a scenic route that passed between the lakes and led south toward E90, the coastal highway. The asphalt road they'd marched down continued on to the west, eventually passing out of the highlands and down to the coastal city of Thessaloniki. Athena's troops would come from that direction, and according to the _strategos_, they were probably already on the move. The guardian had given the west road a single glance and then issued orders to deploy her troops.

"Set the guns on the high ground to the north, and south of the road," she'd told two of the _chiliarchoi_, as she indicated a pair of low rises flanking the road seventy and a hundred yards back the way they'd come. "Position your companies to flank the weapons and block the road. Send snipers out for two miles on the north side and don't hesitate to use the environment. Remember...you must force them down the dirt track. You do not need to exterminate them."

The officers had nodded and moved to implement her orders. Soon two wagons and 2,022 clones had slipped away into the dark.

"The rest of you come with me," Secunda had ordered, starting down the dirt track. 1,011 clones and two wagons followed her. It had already been 0445 hours.

For an hour and a half they'd marched on, until they reached the narrowest point between Lakes Koroneia and Bolbe. There they'd halted. It was visibly narrower now than any of them remembered from their original life. That had been an unexpected advantage. One of the wagons was unloaded and the "special" had chosen a depression hidden among tall weeds twenty yards off the road.

"Walk from the road in my footprints and bury it here, just beneath the surface," she'd told a detail of clones equipped with entrenching tools. She'd taken the detonator and clipped it to her belt opposite her chakram.

As they were digging, Secunda had chosen a clone at random and given her orders.

"Take the horses from the wagon and report back to the crossroads on our progress, then attach yourself to the scouts."

The clone had nodded, unhitched the horses and ridden north. The empty wagon was hitched behind the one still laden. Secunda remembered that the land around the lakes was almost flat...at least it had been in her time and that didn't seem to have changed. An empty second wagon wouldn't overtax the horses on a short haul, and it couldn't be left behind for the enemy to find as evidence of their presence. Gravel, she'd mused looking down, showed very little that would serve a tracker.

When they were finished with that task, the company had set out again as the first hint of dawn blushed the eastern sky. They'd traveled for another half-hour before Secunda called a halt. By then a mile and a half lay between themselves and the trap they had set between the lakes. Again Secunda had dismissed a clone to join the scouts, riding one horse and leading a second. She too had headed north to report to the others on their status.

The land had been curving up and now the clones stood in an elevated position four hundred feet above the lakes' water level. Behind them, a valley narrowed around the gravel road as the land continued upwards to the heights at the southern margin of the interior plateau. A small stream ran down in a shallow bed to their left, on the western side of the road. They occupied a point where a fold of land had been etched by erosion, leaving a gully on their right, which deepened as it led away to the east from the road. The land on of its sides rose fairly steeply, more so within the gully than facing the lakes. It was wider and deeper now than the small creek where Xena remembered watering Argo on the fateful journey that had ended outside of the city of Potidaea, with the rescue of Gabrielle. Gabrielle...the name that went with a decomposing body she'd seen for a few seconds in a lab under the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

"Deploy the weapon here, right on the road," Secunda had ordered the commander of a thousand. She'd ignored the surprising twinge of latent feelings evoked by the memory of someone she'd never met.

The _chiliarchos_ had called out the company's gunnery detail and they'd set up their M-61A1 dead center of the gravel track, pointing back the way they'd come. This gun crew moved as quickly as the crew that had accompanied the Destroyer of Nations. The two empty wagons had been drawn up tail to tail to flank the gun emplacement and provide some cover against small arms fire. The gun sat in deep shadows beneath the tailgates, fronted by its steel armor plate.

"Open fire on my signal. Stay with the weapon until you're out of ammunition, then move immediately into the gully," Secunda had instructed the gun crew. She'd turned to the _chiliarchos_ and said, "Deploy your troops along the front-side of this ridge facing the road." She'd indicated the land facing the lakes. "They should stay near the top. On my signal, abandon those positions and move into the gully quickly."

The _chiliarchos _had nodded in understanding. She'd seen what they'd buried between the lakes.

Secunda's gaze swept the land bordering the road. It was almost flat, dry, with clumps of coarse grass and not a tree for miles. She smiled in approval.

"Mine the land beside the road from 100 to 500 yards out," she told the officer, "we only have 10 mines but they won't know that. Put five on each side within a yard of the gravel. Then dig another couple hundred holes further out and loosely fill them back in as decoys. Make them obvious."

The commander of a thousand had passed the guardian's orders on to her ten _hecatontarchea_, who in turn had relayed the orders to the troops. As always, they'd moved quickly to obey. Each of the 200 clones on the landmine detail dug a hole beside the road and filled it back in before returning to her ambush position on the slope. The land alongside the road appeared to be a prodigious and hastily created mine filed. At 0900 hours they'd been back in position and there was nothing more for them to do until the battle began. The guardian had looked at the sky, reckoned the time by the sun though she wore a watch, and spoken to the _chiliarchos._

"Allow the troops their mess and then rest in shifts at their posts," she'd said, "Post the standard compliment of guards and be sure they watch the highlands." She'd nodded towards the ridges to the south, behind their position. "We don't have scouts up there now. They've been moved to cover the west road."

Not an hour later the sentries had reported a scout approaching at a gallop. She'd met with Secunda on the road and informed the "special" that the enemy had been spotted at 0700 hours breaking camp five miles outside of Thessaloniki. The best estimate of their strength was 16,000. They were expected to reach the crossroads by 1330 hours. The guardian had nodded, instructed one of her clones to provide water and food for the scout and her horse, and then released her to return north. It was 1000 hours and she didn't expect her company to see any action until 1500 hours. Therefore, she'd lain down in the shade under a wagon and fallen asleep.

**Continued in Chapter** **8**

69


	8. Clonefic Part 3 Chapter 8

Clonefic

Part 3 Chapter 8

By Phantom Bard

**For Disclaimer**: See Part 3 Chapter 1

_**April 22, 2006 - The Highlands Beyond Seres, Macedonia**_

Now the first groups of enemy scouts stalked uphill among their unseen foes and the Xenas let them pass. By 1500 hours, the mass of Athena's troops was clearly visible, marching in ordered companies of 500, and walking at an easy pace, ten abreast, 50 ranks deep. 500 and then 1,000 appeared from the forest below, all clones of the warrior Achilles. The lead companies carried spears, shields, short swords, and assault rifles slung over their shoulders. 1,500, then 2,000, then 2,500 showed themselves. The next companies that revealed themselves were armed with carbines, pistols, swords, and daggers. They maintained only fifteen feet between companies. From the very top of the pass, Xena smiled as she watched them advance.

It took the foremost marchers another half-hour to reach the top of the pass. By then, 15 of the 24 companies were visible on the ascending trail. Between the 12th and 13th companies, were a dozen three-wheeled ATVs drawing small trailers filled with gear. The muffled whine of their motors carried on a slight breeze that also conveyed the scent of exhaust. Xena glared at them in irritation. They were taking up space in the enemy's formation. Without them, another two companies would be closer to the ambush, and the more that had walked into range when the firing began, the higher the casualties would climb. The Destroyer of Nations suspected that the troops who marched behind the ATVs might be able to retreat to safety and she would have to settle for a body count of 6,000 rather than 8,000. She watched as the first troops entered the narrows at the top of the pass. In seconds, they would begin to round the curve on the western side. They would come face to face with her own forces, positioned across the pass in rows, prone, kneeling, and standing.

A moment later it began. The first rifle fire came from the clones around the bend. It slammed into the leading company of enemies at a range of only a dozen feet, mowing them down execution style. The Achilleses immediately tried to break formation and dive for cover from the wall of muzzle flashes directly ahead. They'd marched around a bend and run headlong into a solid curtain of gunfire, but they couldn't see any troops holding the guns! Most of them died before they could unshoulder their own weapons. Only a few lived long enough to scream.

The Destroyer's clones raked the fallen bodies with gunfire over and over just to be sure they were dead. Their plan called for them to advance through the pass and they couldn't chance leaving a living enemy at their backs. The unseen Xenas advanced methodically, continuing to concentrate their fire on the head of the enemy's column, and driving the zone of death eastward through the pass. They were creating the necessary breathing room for a special gun crew.

When the slaughter commenced, the enemy scouts walking the slopes to either side of the pass were dragged down and killed by Xena's unseen troops. Then the Destroyer's clones began shooting from both sides of the path, laying down a saturating fire with their automatic rifles. Most of them fired from the prone position, more to reduce the chance of friendly fire casualties than from fear of enemy fire. From the high ground to each side, the belt-fed .50 caliber machine guns taken from the Truman's bow opened fire. First they struck the ATVs, turning them into a flaming wreckage rocked by secondary explosions that partially blocked the path against retreat or advance. Then their long arcs of raking fire turned to slam into the ordered companies of enemy clones.

To the enemies, the gunfire seemed to come from all directions. Xena's clones had ranged as much as a quarter mile downslope on both sides. The machine guns were placed in nests of boulders near the top, close in on each side. They had almost ideal fields of fire. The only area they couldn't target was the deadly top of the pass itself and perhaps a hundred feet to either side. Into these areas, companies of foot soldiers poured a hail of bullets that drowned out the screams of the dying.

The clones of Achilles began to return fire after the ambush started, but they could find no easy targets. In desperation, they sprayed bullets indiscriminately upslope. They couldn't see their enemies. Tactical wisdom told them that the ambushers were well camouflaged and dug in deep. The best they could do was to target the muzzle flashes of the weapons firing at them, but that meant having their heads up, searching for the sources of the fire that was decimating them, and of course, risking a round between the eyes. Even so, they caused some casualties, as much by luck as by skill.

In this type of a firefight, dominance depended on the density of accurate rounds each side could lay down. Though the Xenas were technically outnumbered six to one, only about three-quarters of Athena's troops were in position to return fire. These were restricted to a narrow file with very long flanks, an extremely vulnerable condition. Xena's clones had the advantages of initial surprise, position, weaponry, and they were invisible. Their numbers and high rate of fire capitalized on the surprise of the ambush. They intimidated their enemies with a constant hail of accurate bullets from automatic weapons quickly brought to bear. It was crude, bloody slaughter, and the weapons did most of the work.

In a purely modern engagement of this scale, both sides would have called in airstrikes, applied supporting fire from mortars or remote artillery batteries, or utilized dozens of grenades. But this was neither a purely modern nor a purely ancient engagement. It was a deadly bastardized hybrid. Xena's _kataskopoi_ had reported on the enemy's available armaments, and the Destroyer had encumbered her troops with only what was necessary to defeat them.

The Destroyer of Nations watched all this from her place at the top of the ground near the pass. Xena actually stood within five yards of enemy clones several times, but they never saw her. She watched her enemies falling, and with her other eye she also saw her own troops firing. By infrared, their weapons bloomed with heat.

The first two minutes of the attack saw the top of the pass cleared of living enemies. Their bodies blocked the path from side to side for a hundred feet, in many places two and three deep. Downslope, the road was already littered with dead. The secondary explosions amidst the burning ATVs reported the presence of RPGs or perhaps mines among their cargo. The living were cringing and seeking cover. Some were shooting blindly. A grim smile curled her lips. As always, her clones aimed for the head.

Now an assigned detail of ten clones began moving Xena's heavy weapon upslope to the crest of the pass, while others shoved the dead aside as they quickly trotted forward. Two of them set a tripod on the downslope side of the pass. Another three from the special detail lowered an M-61A1 onto it. The other clones had tossed the enemy dead out of the way to form a crude wall several bodies high. The tripod crew loaded the first magazine as the rest set down the batteries and attached the lead clips to the high-speed motor. Three more clones hefted a quarter-inch steel plate into position in front of the gun and clipped it to the tripod to serve as both a shield and ballast.

On their Mediterranean passage they had practiced this drill over and over again aboard the USS Harry Truman. Now it took only 100 seconds before the low-pitched belch of the 20mm Gatling gun commenced. They had stripped the M-61A1 out of its Phalanx gun carriage and detached the radar. The tripod from a TOW infantry missile launcher served as a support. Batteries intended for emergency lighting aboard the Truman powered the only necessary motor, the one that turned the six barrels to fire 4,500 rounds per minute. All the other mechanisms were gear driven from it.

_(The weapon fired 20mm shedding sabot sub-caliber projectiles. Each "bullet" was a 15mm depleted uranium armor piercing round inside a plastic shell. The plastic sabot minimized friction, reducing wear and heating of the barrels. The Phalanx system had been designed to destroy aircraft or cruise missiles. Against personnel, the reduction in projectile size made no difference at all. The heavy metal, 3/5th-inch diameter bullets carried so much energy that they passed through up to a half-dozen bodies, and at the gun's rate of fire, it was as if a solid wall of projectiles was mowing down targets like a scythe.) Editor_

The entire enemy column was easily within range, and the Destroyer's gunnery clones began killing those furthest away while their sisters concentrated on those closest. They fired in bursts until the magazine was empty, spun the barrels to cool them until the next magazine was in place, and then stopped them for reloading. The clones had practiced this sequence so intensively that they meshed together with unconscious precision. And of course, they were clones of Xena, dedicated to perfecting their skills. Over the six minutes that the gun was operational, they emptied four magazines totaling 6,000 rounds, and killed nearly 5,000 of the enemy.

The battle raged for just over twenty minutes before trailing off. Xena searched the downhill road with eagle sharp eyes and saw only the feeble movements of the wounded. She heard their groans of pain, and the occasional scream. She calculated twelve companies slaughtered, the destroyed ATVs, and perhaps most of another two companies behind them. She followed the road down into the forest where it disappeared from view. More dead down amongst the trees. A conservative estimate, 7,000 dead and dying.

There was no way to know how far the enemy had retreated, but somewhere down there the demoralized survivors were seething with hatred and craving vengeance. She would not send her troops down to confront them. The potential gains didn't justify the risk. Xena would content herself with the existing level of damage and accept her victory. 6,000 or 8,000 would make no difference in the end. Now Athena's troops would fear her technology, her tactical abilities, and her viciousness. When the time came, they would accept her terms for a final battle, fought with the old weapons, hand to hand.

Her clones had ceased firing. They stood vigilant but still cloaked. Xena reached up and raised her filter. At the crest of the pass she suddenly appeared, a black uniformed silhouette, standing alone against the bright afternoon sky. In a single swift movement, she drew her sword and raised it overhead. She knew she was too far away to be heard, but she could still send a message.

By tilting her polished blade in and out of the sunlight, she cast blinding flashes to the trees below, spelling out words across the distance as warriors had signaled each other in ancient times.

_With the Blessing of Ares, the true God of War, I, the Destroyer of Nations, shall kill you all. Meet me face to face if you dare. _

For several minutes Xena stood still, searching for an answer, but none came. Finally she turned away and leaped down onto the path. Over the next hour, her troops withdrew. They made sure that they were safely out of their enemies' sight before decloaking. Let them think that they had been bested by the Warrior Princess' vaunted stealth and the battle tactics of the ancient Amazons. Last of all came the scouts, almost two hours after the firing ceased.

"_Strategos, _the enemy has retreated a league into the forest and is encamped on the road," one scout reported.

"By their initial count, they have numbered their dead at 7,200," a second added.

"Who commands them?" Xena asked.

"An Elainis," the second scout answered, "Athena's Favorite."

"You saw her?"

"Saw her for the first time an hour ago as I stood near their camp," the second scout said. "She had not been seen before." The first scout nodded in agreement.

"She wasn't there before," Xena told them. "The column behaved like an army from Mycenaean times. Athena's Chosen would have known better."

The clones regarded this in silence. After several moments, Xena issued more orders.

"Take the heads of 100 enemies and set them on their own spears in a row blocking the pass. Impale their bodies with the butt spikes so they appear to be sitting up with long necks."

The clones nodded in approval. They had expected this and remembered having left similar messages before. Last of all, Xena asked for the tally of her own army's dead and wounded.

"Thirty-one dead, mostly unlucky head shots. There are also sixty-four wounded with miscellaneous injuries, _Strategos_," a _chiliarchos_ reported. "The body armor stopped the small arms fire."

"Bring 'em all back," the Destroyer of Nations commanded, "we'll honor our dead with pyres at Amphipolis because they have been Blessed by Ares. Can the wounded walk?"

"All but seven who suffered leg or spinal injuries." The commander of a thousand told her general.

"Carry 'em on litters to the wagon, then they can ride."

"_Strategos_, there are two with spinal wounds who will not recover," the _chiliarchos_ reported matter-of-factly.

"Then they are warriors who can't fight. At Amphipolis, offer them the honor of a pyre," Xena told her evenly. "I honor the dead, but this army has no hospice."

At 1800 hours the Destroyer of Nations' army began their march back to Amphipolis. Behind them lay the carrion of war; over 7,000 enemy dead, cooling in the shadows of the eastern slope. Under the coming dawn, the scent of blood and breached entrails would be joined by the first reek of putrescence in the rigor stiffened cadavers. By the next nightfall it would be intensifying, and as the rigor faded in the second day's heat, when Athena's troops might again venture uphill, it would be reaching a nauseating intensity.

After the battle, Xena had examined several of the dead. The birthmark on their right cheeks had progressed as Dr. Kishihara had predicted, from a full moon shape to the barest sliver of a crescent that she saw now. With it had gone the ancient blessing of Thetis, the imperviousness to wounds that had left only Achilles' heel vulnerable. It had been just a matter of a genetic heritage, a vulnerable heritage that could be abridged as the body's cells replaced themselves during life. The sociopathic doctor had managed to mutate Achilles' genes so that he had lost his inherited advantage within a year and a half. Just another mortal warrior, the Destroyer of Nations mused, another dead warrior.

As the first day's light faded after the battle, Xena's clones marched downhill. They had left behind the now useless M-61A1, its ammunition expended and its barrels heat-warped upon cooling, as a taunt to the enemy. The wounded were carried on litters, but the bodies of thirty-three dead were piled on travois, lashed down, and dragged. Knowing that it was easier to haul the dead than the wounded, the two irreparably damaged clones had taken their own lives.

_**April 22,2006 - South of Sohos, Chalcidice**_

At 1340 hours a clone called her name, but Secunda was already awake. Even in her sleep she'd heard the faint low-pitched growls of the two Gatling guns flanking the road six miles away. It seemed to her that the high plateau acted as an amphitheater in which sounds carried unhindered in the clear bright air. She squinted at the sun burning in the cloudless sky and then crawled out from under the wagon.

"Watch for dust rising from the road," she instructed the closest sentry.

The sentry clone was standing on the wagon's bench, seeking a higher eyepoint. She was staring north through an oversized pair of field glasses.

"Nothing yet, Guardian," she announced.

"No, probably not for another hour," the "special" agreed. "They've gotta be turned away from the main road, then find their way down the gravel track. It'll take a while since they'll be under fire and marching in a long column. The gravel track is narrower so there'll be confusion as they reform their files." The scout nodded at her words but never took her eyes from the binoculars.

Just after 1400 hours the sentry reported seeing, not dust, but smoke to the north. The guardian sampled the breeze and smiled. It came from the east, mild but constant.

The company waited another ten minutes and then Secunda gave the order to cloak. At 1410 hours the entire company vanished. All that could be seen were a pair of empty wagons drawn up across the road.

At 1415 a horse galloped up to the wagons and came to a halt. The beast appeared to be riderless, but bore a saddle, and tack. The clones could see the invisible rider with their infrared filters. Secunda went to hear the scout's report.

"They've been turned," she announced as she caught her breath, "I was two furlongs down the gravel road and saw the enemy column starting to march this way. They sustained heavy casualties in a twenty-minute firefight before the guns ran out of ammunition. Then the _chiliarchoi_ set the grass afire and withdrew behind its cover. We were lucky that the wind was in our favor. It fanned the flame and smoke directly towards the enemy. That more than our assault decided them and they took the turn. The Callistos among them were particularly easily convinced."

Like the rest of the clones, those commanders of a thousand near Sohos remembered firing the brush to break an enemy's advance or force them into a killing ground. It was a good tactic when the winds cooperated. There had been one rather pathetic and memorable case though....

In 72 BC Xena had set ten thousand acres of wheat, barley, hay, and other crops aflame to save a village from a warlord named Talmadeus who had demanded their supplies. The warlord had raised an astonishing army of 4,000 mercenaries, and had needed massive amounts of victuals for an autumn campaign against the city of Abdera. The city lay on the Aegean coast, east of the mouths of the Nestos River in Thrace. The village Talmadeus had threatened was the principal farming community inland and traded their surplus crops to the city for fish, salt, and other goods.

The fire was intended to prove to the warlord that the villagers were willing to burn their crops before turning them over to marauders who would enslave them. Either way they expected to half-starve during the coming winter, and they'd chosen to do it as free men. It was the lesser of two evils; the kind of choice that Xena and Gabrielle had come to call, "deciding for the Greater Good".

The burn was to have taken place in a restricted number of fields that were furthest from the village and had been deemed the most risky to harvest. At least that had been the plan. Zephyr hadn't cooperated. The wind had strengthened and shifted, suddenly coming from the north. The fire had gotten out of hand and burned all of the crops and part of the village. It wasn't quite Cirra revisited, but the results hadn't been pretty.

Talmadeus couldn't hold his army together without taking the riches of Abdera, and his mercenaries wouldn't fight on empty stomachs. The village and the city were saved...sort of. It was another Phyrric victory, much like Amphipolis, and Xena had been there, done that. The soulmates had left the area as quickly as the warlord.

In the end, over 1,000 villagers and outlying farmers starved to death that winter...men, women, and children. The citizens of Abdera, who had benefited most from their sacrifice, took further advantage of the starving farmers by forcing them into tenancy, outright slavery, and prostitution. By that time, Xena and Gabrielle were hundreds of miles away, just beginning their fight with Callisto. Salmoneus, the swindler Xena had used at Corinth in 78 BC, was already dead, and there had never been a "Lord Seltzer".

"Self-sacrifice never goes unpunished," Secunda whispered to herself. Beside her the scout nodded in agreement, remembering of the same story.

The sentries reported the first dust from the gravel road at 1450 hours. It was still perhaps three miles distant. At 1510 they could see the reflected glints of sunlight on spearheads as the leading enemy companies closed to within a mile. By 1525 they were only a couple furlongs away. If they thought anything amiss because of the wagons, they didn't stop. At 100 yards the column finally came to a halt, though there was some jostling as the order was passed back through the ranks. The lead company of Achilles clones looked dusty and tired from their earlier battle and forced march. A detachment of two-dozen moved forward.

"Steady," Secunda ordered, "we'll let them come and satisfy their curiosity. Kill 'em when they see the gun. After that, fire at will."

The enemy clones moved forward warily, but the landscape appeared deserted. They got within ten yards before recognizing the Gatling gun nestled in the harsh shadows between the wagons. One pointed to it and they paused. The clones spoke together for several moments and then advanced again. They reached the wagon, wondering why anyone would leave a heavy weapon abandoned in the center of the road. It appeared to be ready to fire...in fact, they could see the drumlike magazine, large as a beer keg, and the link belt of ammunition entering the breech. They split up, and while a dozen remained in front, six moved around the wagons on each side to investigate. Near the front wheels they were met with quickly moving swords. It was 1545 hours.

The dozen clones still in front of the wagons saw their comrades falling and started to reach for their weapons. They too were cut down by unseen clones who beheaded them with their swords. The enemies in the column reacted immediately, dropping their spears and freeing their rifles. It was as if a shudder ran through the column from front to back as it came to life, accompanied by shouts of warning and anger.

Then the M-61A1 opened fire directly on the column. The rumbling growl and high-pitched whine of the motor spinning the barrels was accompanied by a tongue of flames that leapt toward the enemy ranks. On the slope adjacent to the gravel road, Secunda's enhanced eyes saw a stream of black projectiles flicking out like bees in a blur of constant motion that mowed down their targets. The ranks fell as the impacts pitched bodies backwards, rounds punching through up to a half-dozen at a time regardless of their woven body armor. In a scant few heartbeats, several hundred lay dead.

The rest of the clones in Secunda's company opened fire with their rifles from the slope as the enemy column began to break up. Clones of Achilles, Callisto, Mavican, and Elainis dove to the sides of the road, crawling away from the terror of the Gatling gun, and trying to find cover from the hail of bullets that zipped through the air all around them. Some returned fire, aiming by instinct towards the sounds of the Xenas' weapons.

Suddenly a crawling Achilles clone put his weight on the pressure plate of a landmine. The unmistakable explosion blasted his body upward and showered the road with a cloud of dirt. The crawling clones froze, fearing the presence of more mines, their eyes searching the area. Soon they were pointing to the landscape and yelling to each other. They were immobilized by indecision and crawled aimlessly, trapped between the gun they saw, the mines they suspected, and the unseen shooters ahead. The Xenas picked them off, desperate to hold them close to the road. They couldn't be allowed to spread out and form a front, for they outnumbered the Destroyer's clones many times over.

Then somewhere back in the ranks one of Athena's officers must have realized that they were at too great a disadvantage and ordered his men to fall back and regroup. At a point that the watching "special" estimated was 2,000 from the head of the column, soldiers began to slowly back away. Ahead of that point chaos reigned, and the guardian estimated 50% casualties already. She needed to kill these troops now, lest they survive later. They were the ones most likely to become a threat.

"Fire only on the lead companies," Secunda ordered. "Lay into 'em!"

Her clones were reloading the M-61A1 and there was a lapse in the gun's firing. Some of the enemy got to their feet and sprinted to the rear while others shot bullets blindly up the road trying to provide cover. The Xenas kept mowing them down with small arms fire, aiming as much as possible for their heads. Then the big gun resumed spewing its deadly hail. More bodies quickly fell and the enemy clones dropped prone. Secunda noted that the most effective cover the enemy soldiers could find was behind the bodies of their own dead. The body armor on the corpses could stop an assault rifle round. But the rounds from the 20mm gun passed through the cadavers, actually flinging them into the air. From those projectiles there was no hiding place on the barren flatland or the road. The clones firing the Gatling gun mowed through the mounds of dead, mercilessly searching out the living and taking more lives. Soon none were standing down there on the road, though some were still crawling.

By now the rear ranks had retreated 40 yards and were still moving back. They were firing as they went, pacing backward behind a wall of automatic weapons fire, but they had no targets to aim at. Like those who had been defeated by the Destroyer in the east, they assumed that their foes were simply well camouflaged and dug in. They fired at the positions they themselves would have been deployed to. Most of their bullets were striking too low on the slope, but the occasional lucky shot felled some of Secunda's troops. The Gatling gun fell silent again as it was reloaded a second time. The hail of small arms fire broke off to occasional reports as the Xena clones sniped from the slope at the decreasing number of enemy survivors below.

The gun crew had reloaded the Gatling gun as Secunda surveyed the situation. Her clones were mopping up the few living clones still left from the first company of enemies. The remainder of the enemy column was still retreating.

"Fire at their feet and then over their heads," the guardian ordered. She wanted them to continue retreating, not become inflamed to stand and fight, or worse yet, desperate enough to charge.

The gun crew complied. The column reacted, ducking away on instinct. Another mine blew up beside the ranks of soldiers. Under a rain of dirt from the explosion, the lead ranks of the Athena's army began to break formation. Enemy clones at the front tried to move away from the danger faster than those behind. There was jostling and the retreat hastened. For the first time, Secunda drew her pistols and emptied both weapons directly at the front rank. They were over 160 yards away now, and against their body armor the pistol fire was mostly for effect. As soon as the Glocks were empty she moved several body lengths to her right and reloaded. No return fire came despite the high visibility of the muzzle flashes.

That was it, the guardian decided. The enemy's morale was broken. They would continue to retreat rather than counterattack. Perhaps it would have been different if the Destroyer's troops had been visible and their positions known...or their lack of numbers.

"Abandon your posts," Secunda ordered her company. "Proceed into the gully and go east...decloak and run."

The clones immediately left the road and the slope and hastened into the narrow defile. They didn't form ranks but immediately began racing away. Behind them Secunda remained alone, observing the enemy's retreat. They didn't give any sign of slowing down or stopping. Soon they were 180 yards away, then a furlong, then finally two. She continued to wait, giving her own forces time to withdraw. It was quiet now. The shooting had stopped. All she heard was the faint breeze and the pings and clicks from the cooling barrels of the M-61A1.

After a quick glance at the sun, she turned and began jogging away. Only when she cleared the top of the slope and started down into the gully did she lift her filter and reappear. In her own estimation she was moving at a prudent speed on a scree-covered incline, but she would have outpaced an Olympic runner. Then she hit the flat ground next to the creek and broke into a full out run.

The Xenas were precise genetic duplicates of the original Warrior Princess, blessed with her metabolic advantages. Secunda was something else again, genetically enhanced for a simplified nerve arc that conferred inhumanly quick reflexes. But the benefits didn't stop there. Anything the Xenas could do, already quicker, faster, and stronger than a normal human being, the "specials" could exceed. In all of history, Secunda and her identical twin, Prima, were the closest that mortals had ever come to godhood. She hit her stride and covered the first mile in 90 seconds. Before the fifth minute ended she had caught up with the rest of her clones. She slowed and moved forward to take her place at the head of the column, and as she did, she lifted the detonator from her belt clip.

"Everybody down," she ordered. "Cover your heads."

The line of clones halted and lay prone against the northern bank. They wrapped their arms over their heads, covering ears and eyes. Secunda unscrewed a safety cap from the detonator's end and depressed a red button.

From the north came a flash of light so intense that it eclipsed the sunlight of a bright afternoon. Following it was a roaring blast, the bellow of the very earth, wounded like a quarrel-struck beast, which grew so loud that every clone felt it in her bones. Sound melded with sensation in a combined assault that culminated with a tremor that bounced them on the quaking earth. It shook loose rocks and dirt that tumbled down on them from the top of the gully. For long moments it felt like an earthquake that went on and on, shockwave after shockwave transmitted through earth and atmosphere, into their bodies from the ground they lay on and from the very air they breathed. Then came the wind and the heat.

The blast wave carried tons of dirt, and it slammed through the atmosphere overhead like a tidal wave scouring the sky. The pulse was from a shockwave of expanding air, displaced at supersonic speeds from the detonation of the Mk-28 thermonuclear bomb buried between the lakes. At the blast center, temperatures immediately rose to solar levels of over 10,000,000ºF. Identical blasts had destroyed the cities of Athens, Rome, Alexandria, and Tel Aviv on New Year's Day. On April 22nd, a three-mile diameter fireball engulfed the land between Lakes Koroneia and Bolbe, instantly killing the remaining 9,500 of Athena's cloned warriors. Not a single one survived.

Secunda and her company were in a well-protected position ten miles from the blast. Had they been standing in an exposed position, the neutron bombardment, X-ray radiation, and the firestorm that followed would have killed and cooked them in an instant. As it was, each absorbed contamination that would have killed an ordinary human. But the clones, already gifted with metabolisms that healed far faster than normal, had been further protected by Dr. Drexler's nanobot serum. Even as the high-energy neutrons damaged their cells, their bodies fought to repair them and maintain their biological functions. And slowly, healing outpaced damage as the environmental insult diminished second by second, minute by minute. Fifteen minutes after the blast, they were ready to move, though none were unaffected.

"Everybody up," Secunda ordered, and the clones staggered to their feet. "Move out."

They resumed a jogging pace down the gully. Overhead a nightmarish lightning-split blanket of brownish red-orange hung low over Chalcidice, fanning out from the familiar mushroom cloud. It rumbled like the rolling thunder that accompanies heat lightning, as if in a stuttered echo of the initial explosion. A pall of heated dust thickened the air. The clones ran on with bandannas over their faces under the gloomy sky.

As she jogged east with her sisters, the guardian pondered the fugitive sensation that had come upon her at the memory of someone named Gabrielle.

_**April 22, 2006 - Off Thasos, Northern Aegean Sea**_

The Miss Artiphys had parted ways with the Argo at 0115 hours. The company of a hundred had marched south from Amphipolis at 1100 hours the morning before. They'd moved quickly down the Strymon River and then east along the Aegean coast. At 2110 they'd reached Kavala where the ships were anchored. The thirty-five mile trip had been uneventful. All those lands were held by the _strategos_, patrolled by her scouts, and the _hecatontarchea_ had received running reports of the conditions on land and sea.

Once they'd reached the docks of Kavala, the commander of a hundred had reported her orders to the sentries guarding the docks and then taken command of the submarine and the hydrofoil. She had divided her company then, sending 75 aboard the sub, and after clearing their checklists, they'd set sail at 2340 hours.

"Withdraw to the Strymon by 1500 hours tomorrow," the _hecatontarchea_ had told the soldiers as she'd gazed at the huge carrier anchored three furlongs offshore, "the _strategos_ predicts a battle tomorrow night, and we're ordered to defend and then scuttle the Truman. It won't be safe here."

The sentries and scouts had eyed the fire control console that the company had brought aboard the Miss Artiphys and needed no further evidence. Scuttle the Truman, they'd thought? There wouldn't be anything left to sink. They'd nodded their agreement and moved off the docks and into the city, for soon they would have nothing left to guard.

In the still darkness just before midnight, the sub and the hydrofoil had cast off their lines and slipped away to sea. They'd proceeded south at a quiet ten knots. There was no rush. The _strategos_ had predicted that the enemy flotilla wouldn't appear before the next evening. They would be part of a coordinated three-pronged attack, in which Athena's armies would assault Amphipolis from the north, crush the western flank from Chalcidice, and drive them down the Strymon Vale to face a force of marines on the coast. That third contingent would forfeit the element of surprise for all three if it appeared prematurely. In fact, it would be to its advantage not to approach until the battle was already joined at Amphipolis and the Destroyer's troops were fully preoccupied. Most likely they would land on the coast to the east, then wait for the time when they could charge toward the mouth of the Strymon to play their part as the anvil upon which the cloned army would be crushed. Xena had estimated the enemy force at approximately 8,000, the smallest of the three since it would have to land and join the fight in as little time as possible. She had told them to expect numerous amphibious troop transports and their support ships.

"You must destroy them while they are engaging the Truman," Xena had ordered. "Don't let 'em land."

At 0100 hours the two ships had approached the island of Thasos. A few lights shone out from the coastal town of the same name, almost out of sight around a headland to the east. The town of Thasos, where Xena had bought her goats, was the very same town that the ancient Hellene's Bane had laid siege to in 77 BC. She had overrun the defenders and sacked the town, and among its treasures, she had captured the then Roman Legatus Legionis Gaius Julius Caesar. She should have run him through along with his officers, for the incident sparked a lifetime of the bitterest rivalry and deepest hatred. After 33 years at war against each other, the Roman Emperor and the Thracian Warrior Princess had died on the same day and in the same city. The town of Thasos had survived them both...and the Roman, Byzantine, Moorish, and Ottoman Empires, plus two World Wars. Perhaps it would survive the near future as well.

The submarine turned east, to port, and the hydrofoil turned to starboard. They parted in the same darkness and silence with which they'd made this short run. As the Argo came abreast of the headland, it submerged, to pass unseen around to the south side of the island. The Miss Artiphys continued towards the western side of the island, running like a shadow across the waves. At 0200 hours the ship hove to in the broad bay on the southwest side of Thasos and hung in close to shore. The _hecatontarchea _was thankful for the vessel's shallow draft, which allowed her to draw within a small cove that read less than two fathoms deep.

"No anchor," she ordered, "use the channel motor against the tide."

She wanted to be able to come to flank speed and launch the craft into the open sea at a moment's notice if they were seen. In the lee of the shore, they were sitting ducks. Only on the open waves could they capitalize on the hydrofoil's speed and maneuverability. It could easily outrun any conventional hull or submarine. It could even outrun an average torpedo's 35 to 55 knots. Only a few commercial short-run hydrofoil ferries could match her pace, and only then on calm waters. In the unlikely event that such a ship appeared and gave chase, they had the Phalanx. The same weapon answered against the more real threats posed by cruise missiles or aircraft.

The commander of a hundred sat down on the bridge and partially raised the ship's mast. This was not a standard ship's mast, rigged to loft a fabric sail. Rather, it was a mast such as was present on a submarine. Five telescoping sections of stainless steel, mat finished in black, which held a precision periscope and extended from the bridge to a maximum height of 35 feet. The _hecatontarchea_ switched on a monitor and rotated the mast to a start position with a joystick, then chose an infrared filter. She set the mast's controls to perform a slow oscillation through an arc of 120º, once every two minutes, set the cursor at sea level in the center of the monitor to position an IR sensor, and turned on the silent alarms. The sensor would react to a deviation of 10ºF above ambient temperatures in a field of 2º. If a vessel with a warm hull, a heat bloom in its power plant, lanterns, lights, or crew on deck passed through the search field, soft red lights would begin blinking throughout the ship.

Having prepared the ship for surveillance, the commander of a hundred put her feet up on the console and promptly dozed off. She trusted the ship's sensors, but she trusted the _strategos'_ judgement evenmore. Xena's analysis of the tactical situation had convinced her that the enemy ships wouldn't pass by until late the following day.

All through the night the sensor kept watch on the empty black sea. When morning came, the _hecatontarchea_ ordered the Miss Artiphys to stand off five mile from shore for a look around. The hydrofoil was still on station at 1500 hours, but the Aegean had remained empty to the horizon since daybreak. It confirmed Xena's expectations.

The day featured a clear sky under the same bright Mediterranean sun that the clones remembered from their previous life. A welcome breeze mitigated the heat without raising more than gentle swells. The conditions were perfect for observation and the hydrofoil bobbed gently as the commander of a hundred searched the distance with the periscope mast in telescopic mode. She watched her monitor as the mast rotated in endless circles, while a band of numbers crawled along the top of the screen denoting the compass heading in degrees and minutes of arc. It was horrendously boring, but during the daylight hours, IR sensing simply wasn't as effective. The temperature differential between target and background diminished with the day's brightness and heat. She couldn't risk missing a reading.

Eventually her vigilance paid off. At 1610 hours she noted a silhouette to the south-southwest. It was nothing more than an irregular black hump protruding above sea level, but it shouldn't have been there. The _hecatontarchea_ stopped the mast's rotation, then left the monitor and pressed her face to the eyepieces. She zoomed the periscope to its maximum magnification and stared hard at what she saw.

Just edging into visual range were ships. She kept her eyes on their image and watched as they resolved into a flotilla of amphibious troop carriers escorted by a pair of guided missile destroyers...American, she noted, by their profiles.

"Arleigh Burke-class, with four gas turbine engines for propulsion and another three for electricity generation," the clone mused, "where did they get the gas?"

But the puzzling question of the ship's fuel was only of passing interest. What was much more important was that these ships be destroyed. They were as much of a threat as the troops aboard the transports they were escorting. Each vessel carried 90 vertical missile launching tubes, and among those missiles were Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles. The ships also carried Standard and Harpoon missiles, torpedoes, Phalanx systems or Sea Sparrow rockets, and an automated 5" gun.

Even one of them would have thoroughly outclassed the Miss Artiphys in a sea battle. The hydrofoil would be no match for two. The commander of a hundred's only choice was to flee and hope to be ignored. Even so, she coolly watched the flotilla's progress for another ten minutes to verify their course bearing before issuing her orders.

"Bring us onto a course heading of 72º and come to 12 knots," she told the clone manning the helm.

The direction would put the enemy back beneath the horizon in the least amount of time, and the relatively slow speed wouldn't reveal her ship as a hydrofoil. Once out of sight, she could come to flank speed and make for Kavala and the Harry Truman. She would beat them there by hours. Yes, she could flee now, perhaps lead a destroyer off on a chase, and maybe even sink it, but the risk didn't warrant that action and it would leave the second destroyer with the troop carriers untouched and suspicious. No, she would act according to the _strategos'_ plan. Like her general, she wanted to kill them all.

By 1640 hours the distant enemy flotilla had dropped behind the horizon again and the periscope was clear. The _hecatontarchea_ retracted the mast into the bridge.

"Come to 60 knots and make for the Harry Truman," she ordered.

The clone at the helm nodded and pushed the lever on the annunciator to 2/3rds forward and the hydrofoil lunged ahead as it rose onto its hydroplanes. By 1720 hours the Miss Artiphys was closing on the massive aircraft carrier.

"Slow to 6 knots and bring us in behind the breakwater," the commander of a hundred ordered, "set us behind the abandoned yachts, but give us a straight shot out to sea."

The hydrofoil slowed and maneuvered into Kavala's port, sliding up to the docks between the few remaining pleasure craft. The _hecatontarchea_ raised the mast to keep a lookout for the approaching enemy. The mast helps give this vessel the appearance of a sailing craft, she thought, perhaps not good enough to pass a close inspection, but maybe sufficient for a casual glance when their attention is fixed on the carrier.

Sitting on the map table a few feet away was the fire control console from the USS Harry Truman. It had been wired into the Miss Artiphys' power supply and also to the ship's radio. A broadcast preset was tuned to the carrier's receiving frequency in the deserted operations room. With the console, they could control the carrier's electronic warfare capabilities, defensive armaments, and the other surprises that they'd rigged. With her clones, she settled down to wait.

The flotilla came into sight at 1810 hours. It moved in slowly to a distance of ten miles and then halted. A single destroyer broke away from the formation and moved in closer. Aboard the Miss Artiphys, the clones listened in as the enemy hailed the carrier from three miles out. The voice was that of a woman, hard-edged with command, and she spoke ancient Greek. When her transmissions went unanswered, the destroyer went silent and then moved in closer, to a mile away. At a mile, the woman again hailed the carrier, this time demanding acknowledgment and surrender. Again, she got no response. The destroyer fired a series of 5" shells, bracketing the Truman fore and aft. The enemy fired another series of shells low over the flight deck. Still there was no response.

The destroyer held her position. The remaining enemy ships had moved to within three miles and moments later, three troop carriers broke away and closed in.

"She's calling for a boarding party," the _hecatontarchea_ remarked. Her clones nodded in agreement and continued to wait.

When the troop ships came abaft the destroyer, the four vessels moved with the transports sailing in a line behind their escort. They closed the final mile cautiously and then made their final approach to the big ship's stern.

"They're going to go in through the open repair shop bay," the commander of a hundred commented.

The enemy clones quickly tied off their transports to the carrier. The first troops aboard were a heavily armed contingent who secured the repair bay and rigged rope boarding nets for the rest of their comrades. The _hecatontarchea _counted 450 enemy clones of several types as she watched the boarding through the periscope. They'd be as good as dead with the microbes still lingering aboard, she thought, but we don't have a few days to wait for the plagues to kill 'em. The clones had been aboard for five minutes when she opened the battle.

"Detonate the BLU-73s."

_(The BLU-73 is a fuel-air munition containing 75-lbs of highly flammable ethylene oxide, and is deployed in a 550-lb cluster bomb called a GBU-72 that includes three BLU-73 submunitions and an altimeter fuse set for 30 feet. The US Marine Corps used 254 of them in Operation Desert Storm, primarily for psychological effect.) Editor _

Aboard the Harry Truman, each of six 75-lb fuel-air submunitions expelled a high-pressure cloud of ethylene oxide, 60 feet in diameter, before being ignited by a timed fuse. The aggregate fireball blasted out of the open stern in a fast moving jet of flames almost a hundred feet long. Just as quickly, it extinguished itself, having burned every molecule of oxygen available in the repair shop and hanger. Ironically, it did minimal secondary damage, though it had killed every living being aboard.

The reaction was almost instantaneous. As the _hecatontarchea _watched, the destroyer's automated foredeck gun turret swept around to starboard and targeted the single lowered portside aircraft elevator that had been purposely left in the lowered position. It was high enough above the destroyer's main deck to act as a shield for the carrier's hanger.

"Fire the portside aft Sparrows," the commander ordered.

A clone pressed another button on the fire control panel and a moment later the missile launcher closest to the destroyer activated. Already trained to its minimum elevation, the trapdoors on the four launch tubes popped open. The destroyer got off three shots with its 5" gun. The shells slammed into the edge of the portside elevator. Then the Sea Sparrows launched from their tubes in a roiling cloud of smoke. They crossed the 180 feet separating the carrier from the destroyer and slammed into it at almost 150 miles per hour. The four missiles blasted away most of the front and starboard side of the destroyer's deckhouse. The complex radar and communications mast toppled to the main deck, crushing the forward Phalanx turret and obstructing the forward Sea Sparrow and MK-41 missile launching tubes with debris. Internally, the ship's bridge and combat information center took massive damage.

Three miles away, the remaining destroyer and six more troop ships began moving towards the carrier. At once, the destroyer opened fire, launching two Harpoon anti-ship missiles. It was a questionable maneuver, since they were firing over their own damaged sister ship.

"They can hit with a few of those but the Truman's so big it won't go down easily," a clone remarked.

"No, but they could damage the remaining defensive weapons we've got aboard," the _hecatontarchea_ replied, "and I want as many of the enemies as close as possible. Still, it's use 'em or lose 'em I guess. Fire the bow Sparrows on the portside...fire them at the incoming destroyer."

The four missiles shot from the launcher at the front of the carrier just before it was struck amidships by the Harpoons. The anti-ship missiles exploded against the Truman's hull, creating a huge cloud of gray and black smoke that enveloped the middle third of the carrier halfway between the flight deck and the waterline. The four Sea Sparrow missiles raced back towards the destroyer, almost along the same trajectory. Two struck the ship and two passed wide and aft. The two that hit exploded towards the ship's stern, one striking the area of its aft MK-41 missile launching battery, the other near the waterline below the helo deck.

A moment later a series of secondary explosions rocked the approaching destroyer as several of its missile warheads detonated in their launch tubes. A great column of black smoke churned up out of the hull and began rising and spreading.

The nearer destroyer, its bridge battered by the first four Sea Sparrow missiles from the Truman, had begun to back away from the carrier after being struck. Now it lay a boat length aft of the bigger ship and was preparing to launch its own Sea Sparrow missiles.

The commander of a hundred assessed the situation. There was almost nothing further that she could do. All of the Truman's remaining missiles were in the starboard side launchers, pointing away from the attackers. But she had accomplished the first part of her mission. All the ships of the enemy flotilla were within five miles of the USS Harry Truman. They were as good as dead. She retracted the periscope mast.

"All ahead full," she ordered. "Clear the harbor and then come to flank speed. Make our course 175º to Thasos."

The clone at the helm shifted the lever on the annunciator fully forward. Within the hull, control rods shifted and the reactor came to peak output. A heartbeat later the water jets abruptly spewed massive geysers from their nozzles, irised fully open to three-feet in diameter, launching the hydrofoil forward with a stomach-wrenching lurch. The bow rose with the acceleration, and the Miss Artiphys nosed skyward at a 35º angle. By the time the 120-foot vessel had made five boat lengths, it was already clearing 16 knots. Beneath the hull the nozzles of the water jets gimbaled to maintain the most efficient angle of thrust. The black ship rose on its hydroplanes, and with the resulting reduction in water friction, leaped almost immediately to 30 knots.

They passed the USS Harry Truman, three furlongs offshore, at 60 knots and only a minute after breaking cover. The crippled enemy destroyer never even had a chance to react. The clones raced by and didn't look back. On the bridge, one clone read off the increasing distance from the carrier.

"One mile out, Commander."

"We are at flank speed, 90 knots," the helmsman reported.

"Steady as she goes," the _hecatontarchea _told them, "run us out to eight miles."

In the increasing distance, the second destroyer and the troop ships continued to move towards the carrier, now hoping to aid or rescue the survivors of the boarding party and its escort. They didn't react to the flight of the Miss Artiphys, for they had their own pressing problems. Their enemy was the damaged carrier that had fired on them, not what they took to be a harmless hydrofoil yacht, probably filled with terrified rich civilians fleeing the battle, which they ignored.

"Six miles, Commander."

"Steady as she goes."

"Seven miles."

"Stand by the fire control."

"Eight miles, Commander."

"Seal the cabin and initiate air filtration," she ordered.

"Done, Commander," a clone reported after flipping a series of switches. The crew felt a slight sensation of popping in their ears as the cabin came under positive pressure.

"Fire control, release the safeties, lock-out abort, and transmit the triggering sequence."

The fire control officer unscrewed the cap of a covered a button. She flipped several toggle switches and the button lit up red, then she depressed it. The hydrofoil's high-powered, narrow beam, microwave transmitter broadcast a final order to the Truman's combat operations center. It was a code sequence of digital bits that actuated the detonator within the single remaining Mk-28 thermonuclear weapon that the _strategos_ had initially acquired from the carrier. It had been left on the highest deck within the island, the Air Control Center, seven stories above the flight deck.

The clones were still fleeing towards Thasos at 90 knots when the blast lit the air and the sea to the luminance of the sun's surface. The fireball expanded in an unimaginable rush of photons, X-rays, newly formed helium nuclei and high-energy neutrons. Within seconds, the fireball began to rise and expand. It formed a mushroom cloud, with a pillar and cap of fire glowing bright yellow within, red and black outside, that leapt upwards to a height of ten miles. In seconds, the Miss Artiphys was under its shadow, and even at 90 knots it easily outpaced them, shadowing the sea. But by then, they were in the open water, running blind because the ship's glazing was made from Mitsubishi's auto-darkening blast shield, a modification of the industrial glass formulated to reject UV radiation and visible light from arc welding. It had gone opaque black with the first onslaught of photons. A layer of lead foil laminated into the hull stopped the X-rays, but nothing on board could stop the high-energy neutrons.

At one minute after he blast, a shockwave rippled the water beneath the fleeing craft, causing it to launch airborne and then slam back down. The wave front continued at high speed, out into the Aegean. Upon the shores of nearby islands, it would crest into small tsunamis and inundate a few unlucky coastal villages. Secondary shock waves passed through the seabed, adding to the stresses concentrated along the Anatolian Fault, and perhaps hastening the next adjustment and slippage. All those considerations went unrealized to the clones speeding south. They continued to carry out their duties, while on the cellular level, their bodies struggled to repair the instantaneous damage of the hydrogen bomb. Blessed with the ancient genetic gift of their patron god and the nanobots of a modern genius, they survived where normal humans would not.

After a twenty-seven mile run, they rounded the south side of the island of Thasos.

"Transmit the code," the _hecatontarchea_ ordered.

The communications officer activated the VLF transmitter and broadcast a message.

"Ms. A to Argo, surface and rendezvous, mission accomplished at 1910 hours."

The submarine broke the surface 100 yards off the hydrofoil's starboard bow. Neither vessel opened its hatches. Instead, they both made their way south to stand watch on the sea roads approaching Amphipolis. They traveled side by side at 25 knots as a torrent of muddy brown rain began to fall from the bruised sky.

_**April 22, 2006 – Northwest of Limnos, Northern Aegean Sea**_

It had been a long week at sea. In fact to the Gabrielles, any week at sea seemed long. Boats just weren't her favorite thing and it seemed as if all of her had been floating on one boat or another forever. In fact, they'd been aboard ships for almost six straight weeks, first on the Nile, and then on the Mediterranean.

After leaving Damietta in their motley collection of sailboats, the Gabrielles had steered northwest. They'd worked at recalling the seacraft they'd learned from their soulmate 2,000 years before, and discovered to their immense relief that sailing hadn't changed too much. There was still the wind, a sail to catch it in, a rudder to steer by, and the sun and stars to guide their course. Though they were initially uneasy, the actual act of sailing was reassuringly familiar...sort of like going to a dentist you've known for years.

Every one of them had expressed their worries and uncertainties to the others, and they'd all agreed and offered each other encouragement and support. This was typical of Gabrielle, whether there was only one or 8,000. It was behaviorally consistent whether she was dealing with others or herself, and now she was dealing with both...many others of herself. Despite the strangeness of the situation, they'd come to accept it with characteristic good humor. Also telling was that the idea of choosing a leader had never crossed their minds. They were all the same, they all agreed, and they all preferred to work by consensus anyway. Unlike the Xenas, there was no chain of command. They were not an army. They were all equals.

They'd set out from the Nile delta on a fine morning; 8,000 clones packed into just over 200 small ships. They'd taken turns trimming the sails, holding the wheel, checking their position and writing down their thoughts about the experience. Unsurprisingly, every one of them was keeping a journal. By evening of the first day, they'd realized that their convoy had spread out across a dozen square miles. This wasn't due to any variance in the crews' proficiency, but rather to the designs of the ships themselves. At that point, by yelling across the water and waving, they'd passed a message to converge. Those at the front held steady and waited for those behind. Those to the sides heeled in towards the center. Eventually they were close enough to confer, and after shouting to each other for a half-hour, decided to tether all their craft together lest any be lost. So they'd strung lines from ship to ship, forming a loose net that equalized the speed and course of all at a snail-like maximum of 4 knots. It was a raft made up of 203 separate hulls, bristling with fishing poles and bored blonde women, all under a ragged assortment of sails.

For a week they'd continued northwest, making the same headway 24 hours a day. In that time, they'd covered roughly 700 nautical miles since casting off. For the first 400 miles they'd held their course steady, but on the fourth day they'd turned north as the coast of Crete had appeared in the west. They'd woven between the Cyclades and the Sporades and finally passed into the relatively open waters of the Aegean. Today the large island of Limnos had fallen behind during the afternoon, and the Gabrielles turned northwest to make for the mouth of the Strymon.

Around suppertime, the Gabrielles noticed a distant flash up ahead to the northeast. It was about 80 miles away, and at first they took it for lightning, but the sky was still clear. Over the next quarter-hour they watched as a mushroom shaped cloud formed and then degenerated into a peculiar looking squall. A small section of the sky had become unwholesome, with sickly localized clouds overhead and muddy colored rain falling beneath. It was downright ugly. The Gabrielles cringed. They had a bad feeling about it and they commented to each other about this being an ill omen of some doom...hopefully not their own. As it was, they weren't running towards it, and after watching for a while, they decided that it didn't seem to be moving towards them either. The island of Thasos lay between. They decided to continue on their course. Ten minutes later a swell passed beneath every craft, making the boats rise and fall. It wasn't threatening, just odd.

Later, as the sun was setting and they'd moved to 65 miles from the coast, several boats full of Gabrielles who were tethered on the eastern edge of the flotilla noted a peculiar "thing" sticking up out of the water about fifty yards off their starboard side. It looked like the bare trunk of a sapling, paced them for a while, and then disappeared underwater.

That night, during the time when they would have been sitting around a campfire or in front of the TV, the Gabrielles compared their impressions of the days' events. Finally they came to a disturbing consensus. Someone was spying on them and maybe following them, and someone had set off an atomic bomb. From what they remembered of their most recent life, they suspected Athena. Despite their nature, none of them thought they'd sleep well that night. And they were right about that.

_**April 22, 2006 – The Argo, Southwest of Thasos**_

"All ahead 4 knots," the acting captain ordered, "come to periscope depth."

"Making my depth 60 feet," the diving officer reported.

The sub's hull measured 40 feet in diameter and the sail another 15 feet in height. A 60-foot depth left just 5 feet of water above the top of the sail. The captain would be able to extend the periscope tube 10 feet above the surface.

"Sonar, contact details," the captain requested. The prior report had been...interesting.

"Sonar reports 203 contacts, Captain, none producing engine noise, some hull creaking consistent with wooden ships, but in no discernable vessel classes, all moving at 4 knots, all bearing 330º."

"Density inversion? Barrier distortion? Countermeasures?"

"None, Captain, and we are above the thermal boundary, the water is clear."

The captain paused for a moment. 203 wooden vessels of no organized types, running silent, and all moving together towards Amphipolis. If this was an attack force, then it was the most unexpected yet. The _strategos _hadn't foreseen it.

"Helm, maintain course and speed," she ordered, "up periscope."

The scope went up and the captain unfolded the handgrips before gazing into the eyepieces. She rotated the scope and began to observe the undetermined craft. After a moment she exhaled sharply and increased the magnification, zooming in on the nearest boat. And then for long minutes she simply stared at what she saw.

Facing her across a gap that appeared to be only a few yards were a crowd of identical blonde women, staring right at her over the railing of a decrepit fishing boat. Beyond this boat, she'd seen countless other ships in such a range of types as to convince her that this was a mass flight of refugees. The only thing they had in common was the unfurled sails at every mast. None had visible weapons. The blonde women staring back at her bore no weapons either. The captain counted them...37 at the railing...all absolutely identical, and more disturbing, all equally familiar. She knew she'd never seen even one of them in this lifetime, but one had been reported seen in Washington D.C....dead. Extrapolating from what she knew, she did the math...7,511 blonde clones, for they could be nothing else. Figuring for those actually on duty and the differing sizes of the ships, there may as well be 8,000. One for each of ourselves. Who but Athena could have done this?

"First officer, look at this," the captain said to her second in command as she stood aside from the periscope, "memorize it in case I can't report."

It was standard operating procedure in case of an officer's fatality when important intelligence information had been observed. The acting second in command stepped over to the periscope and stared through the eyepiece. She twisted the handgrip to adjust the magnification, and then panned the scope across the armada. Finally she relinquished the scope to her captain, swallowed and reported only, "Observed and noted, Captain."

The captain folded the handgrips and the periscope slid back down into its well.

"Diving officer, gently make our depth 200 feet. Navigator, plot the quickest course to rendezvous with the Miss Artiphys and proceed at flank speed," she told the navigator. To her first officer she said, "You have the Conn."

"Making my depth 200 feet...gently," the diving officer said. "Three degrees down on the bow planes. Adjusting for slow water intake."

The navigator looked up from the chart table to her captain's retreating back, then at her first officer, and noted the puzzled expression on her face.

"What is it? What did you see?" The navigator asked.

"The best or worst thing that could happen to us," the officer answered barely above a whisper, "something that may change everything." Then more sharply, "Plot the course."

In her cabin, the captain reclined against the headboard of her bunk and wrapped her arms around her bent knees. She couldn't get the vision from the periscope out of her head. It was as if she'd stood ten feet in front of Gabrielle, a whole crowd of them in fact, and the effect had been profoundly unsettling.

She'd heard the reports of the dead clone that had been found in the basement lab at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. The captain understood who the blonde had been once or twice before. The Destroyer of Nations had looked at the corpse and then terminated the search. She'd immediately proceeded with the demolition, and though she'd betrayed no emotion, such a change in plans was significant in itself.

Now there seemed to be an army of Gabrielles headed for Amphipolis. They appeared to be unarmed, but that was only an appearance. Their impact on the Destroyer's army would be psychological; the blow to their morale, profound. It would generate more confusion than another army of Achilleses appearing unexpectedly in the midst of battle.

If Athena had created one clone of Gabrielle before then she could have produced these 8,000 clones and turned them loose. One Gabrielle for each of us, she thought. What more could I want. What could I fear more? If I have to, can I kill a clone of my soulmate? _What soulmate?_ And a lifetime of memories assailed her. The minutes passed as the Argo moved north towards the Miss Artiphys.

Beside her bunk the intercom squawked to life. It was the first officer.

"Captain, sonar reports a new contact. Range is 13,350 yards, bearing 200º and closing at 20 knots. It's a submarine, Captain, American, Los Angeles class."

She burst into the control room 8 seconds later with predatory fire in her eyes.

"Sonar, where's the new contact?"

"Range is now 13,200 yards, speed and bearing steady at 200º. Captain, she's not closing on us...she's closing on the 203 earlier contacts."

The captain stared the sonar officer, then asked, "First contact with her?"

"Thirty seconds ago. She just came to life. Must have been sitting dead in the water since Athena's convoy moved in on the Truman, Captain. She's been lying silent for the last three hours or so."

"Hidden escort. All stop, systems down, go silent."

The Argo shut down every sound generating source aboard, and like her newly revealed adversary, she disappeared to all listeners. Only an active sonar ping would reveal her presence, and such a ping would pinpoint the source even more accurately than the target.

"30º right rudder," the captain ordered.

The Argo had shut down her propulsion, but at 45 knots, inertia would carry her forward a good distance before she actually stopped. During that time, the captain intended to execute a turn to starboard and alter their known heading to make their position less predictable. So, she thought, Athena's sub commander considers these Gabrielle clones a preferable target to us, and she must know we're here. _Why?_

"Captain, the Los Angeles has flooded her number one and two torpedo tubes."

Athena's sub was preparing to fire on those pitiful wooden boats? Why would her forces destroy her own creations? Across the control room, the first officer looked her captain in the eyes, waiting for a decision and further orders. Intercede? Reveal their position to save the Gabrielles? Instinct demanded that she protect her soulmate, but that soulmate had been cloned by her enemy. Yet if all that were true, then it didn't make sense for the Los Angeles to be shooting at them now. But if those Gabrielles weren't part of Athena's plan or weren't her creations, then where had they come from?

"Has she opened her outer doors?"

"Not yet, Captain."

"Fire Control Officer, plot a firing solution and flood tubes one and two," the captain quietly ordered. "Enable arming at 1,500 yards. She's an enemy preparing to fire and we won't sit unprepared."

The Argo still had a total of eighteen torpedoes that had been salvaged from the sunken Alfa. They occupied the six torpedo tubes with two spares for each. Flooding a torpedo tube required replacing the tube's air with water and normally that process could be heard by passive sonar, but the Argo had been engineered to do this virtually silently. The air simply moved from the tubes into the ballast tanks while water from the ballast tanks replaced it. This was done by gravity flow, without pumps. Neither air nor water was displaced to the environment. All the changes occurred within the sub's hull, and the sub's total density didn't change. After firing, the tube, still full of water, was bled to the ballast tanks and the air returned to the tube for reloading.

"Tubes one and two are flooded, Captain."

"Standby fire control," the captain ordered. "Position?"

"8,900 yards to their target, speed and bearing steady."

"Relative distance?"

"6,700 yards to us and closing, bearing to the Los Angeles is 5º."

"Steady. Maintain silence."

Another six minutes slowly passed as the Argo's crew waited and the Los Angeles class submarine continued to close on the Gabrielles. It was still ignoring the Argo.

"Captain, the Los Angeles has opened its outer doors," the sonar officer reported. "5,400 yards to target, speed and bearing steady. Relative position is 3,200 yards, bearing 0º."

"She'll pass us to port at 350 yards," the navigator reported. Too close to safely fire.

_Can't let her fire_ the voice of memory screamed in the captain's head. She looked at the first officer and noted the sheen of sweat on her brow and the clench of her jaw.

"Open outer doors and fire torpedo one," the captain ordered, as calmly as if she were ordering a cup of coffee. In the Argo's bow, the iris rings of the first two torpedo tubes snapped open and a pneumatically driven plunger ejected the weapon.

"Torpedo is away," the fire control officer reported.

In the water, the torpedo's prop began to spin at 300 rpm, driving the 20" diameter cylinder to 45 knots. The weapon's homing radar immediately went active, acquiring its target.

"The torpedo has acquired the target. Time to impact is 120 seconds," sonar reported.

"Come to flank speed, bearing 0º," the captain ordered. She would follow the torpedo in, not trusting the weapon to score with a two minute run time. Too much could happen between now and then.

"All ahead full," the helm confirmed. The Argo broke her silence. Her thirty-six foot prop clawed the water as it accelerated, each blade's pitch adjusting for maximum bite, and the submarine lunged forward. "6 knots, 10 knots, 14 knots..."

"Time to impact is 70 seconds. Target has launched a spread of countermeasures and has accelerated to 25 knots."

The Los Angeles class sub had fouled the water with radar opaque dye, and was trying to sidestep the torpedo while leaving a decoy target behind.

"Turn to home on the target. Helm, come to 350º. Speed and range?"

"Our speed is 34 knots and accelerating, Captain. Range to target is now 2,200 yards."

"The target is turning to meet us, bearing 10º."

_So, they want to play chicken?_ An evil grin flickered on the captain's lips.

"Torpedo has lost contact with the target, Captain."

"Original time to impact?"

"10 seconds, Captain." The fire control officer's finger hovered over a button on the fire control panel. "9, 8, 7, 6..."

"Self-destruct."

The fire control officer stabbed the button with her finger. 1,800 yards away, the torpedo exploded, triggered by a small charge that the clones had attached to each of their salvaged weapons. The enemy's maneuvers had placed the detonation 150 yards to the Los Angeles' port side. The explosion would give them a good shaking up.

"Set our safety to zero on torpedo number two," the captain ordered. "Speed?"

"42 knots, coming to flank speed. Distance to target is 1,450 yards."

"They've fired their number one torpedo, Captain."

"Useless, we're already within their minimum safety range. Speed?"

"45 knots, flank. Distance to target is 1,300 yards."

"Their torpedo has acquired...twin screws, sounds like a MK-48, a ship-killer."

"Steady. Sound collision. Red lights."

Throughout the Argo a claxon sounded a warning and the ship's daylights switched to emergency red. Clones grabbed onto any available handholds or assumed crash positions on the decks.

"Distance is now 1,000 yards. Collision course. Their speed is 25 knots."

"850 yards."

"Steady." _One shot only. Give them no time for evasion._

"600 yards, Captain!"

"Fire torpedo two." _You are mine._

"Torpedo is away." And with the Argo at flank speed, it was moving at 45 knots before it was out of the tube. It's screw made 300 rpm towards a target closing at 25 knots. Although it would eventually slow to find its normal 45-knot velocity, for a few hundred yards it was half torpedo, half bullet, and the Argo was the gun. With its safety set to zero, it was armed as soon as it hit the water. Its radar homed in on the target dead ahead.

"Close outer doors, 40º up angle on the bow planes, blow all ballast. Emergency rise."

Without hesitation, the diving officer's fingers flew across the control panel and the helmsman shifted the planes. Neither spent a moment to even acknowledge their orders.

"400 yards."

The sub moved like a high speed elevator ascending. At 45 knots the effect of inclining the bow planes was instant. In an upward lurch that left stomachs behind, the Argo inclined nose up to 40º. It was like hooking a turn in a car at 50 mph.

The Los Angeles' MK-48 torpedo struck a glancing blow against the underside of the Argo's stern, just to port of her keel line, where it left a 6" deep furrow eight feet long in the titanium hull. It was deflected sharply downward and continued on its way.

"Passing 50 feet, Captain."

"All stop."

The Argo was 400 feet long and had been submerged at a depth of 200 feet. She was 55 feet tall at the sail. Running at 45 knots and a 40º incline, she encompassed almost 300 vertical feet. The effect was that 100 feet of the Argo's bow broke from the surface of the water at 52 mph. Suddenly absent normal water resistance, inertia carried another 150 feet of her hull into the air as her angle of incline reduced with her speed. She was still half-airborne when the Aegean rose like a fountain to meet her. It was as if Poseidon himself had thrust up a cushion of spray beneath her hull.

Almost directly below her position, the Russian SS-N-15/81R torpedo struck the Los Angeles class sub head on at a combined speed of 105 knots. The impact stove in the submarine's bow and punched through the sonar compartment. The weapon didn't even explode until it had penetrated 60 feet within the hull. When it went off it detonated the dozen tomahawk cruise missiles waiting in the forward vertical launch tubes, creating a massive secondary explosion that displaced thousands of gallons of water, mostly upward into the air against the lowest resistance. Into this flume, the Argo settled with a tremendous splash, relatively unscathed, though her crew of clones had been tossed around like pebbles inside a maraca. She finally came to rest as the turbulence around her spread and faded in giant fairy rings; a picture of serenity under the rising moon.

A mile and a quarter to the south, 8,000 Gabrielles had watched in amazement.

_**April 22, 2006 – The Gabrielle Armada**_

Under the rising moon a mile and a quarter to the north, a great black fish had leapt almost clear of the sea. It had been launched into its jump by the exuberant energy that fish sometimes possessed, perhaps some living joy that drove them to celebrate their watery lives by leaping into the air. The Gabrielles had seen fish behave this way many times in the streams and lakes of Greece. Happy fish, tickled by the water nymphs. The sea had been happy too, sending up a fount to welcome the big fish back into its embrace. Naturally given to poetic imagery and positive interpretations of events, the Gabrielles reflexively described what they'd seen to themselves in bardly terms. The warrior inside each of them knew better.

It was a submarine warship that waited on the surface a mile and a quarter to the north. It had landed amidst the upwash of some great explosion, but the evidence of that upheaval had passed and now it lay still and silent. Somewhere under the waves a battle had been fought and won by the surviving fish. Somewhere below, the crew of another great fish had met defeat in Poseidon's realm, and now their spirits were embarking in a much smaller boat across the river Styx to the realm of the sea god's brother, Hades. In the subsequent peace, the victor lay at rest. She would recoup her strength and live to fight another day.

The Gabrielles continued to watch the sub closely. It, or its enemy, had approached close to their group's starboard flank near dusk, and observed them through a periscope. Was the crew friend or foe? They were all very aware that they had no weapons and no way to defend themselves. The situation was potentially very threatening, yet the crowds of blondes, staring to the north from the rails of their 203 small boats, didn't feel the fear that came with an overt threat. Rather they felt an edginess that acknowledged the presence of an overwhelming potential for violence that was not directed at themselves. That feeling was familiar. In fact, they'd felt it many times before. The first time...

In the late spring of 78 BC, an eleven-year old girl had been playing with her nine-year old sister in a fallow field within shouting distance of her family's farmhouse. It was late afternoon and both girls had finished their chores. Being in a good mood that day, their mother had granted them a candlemark's reprieve to just be children before they'd have to come and help her prepare supper. But childhood was short-lived in those times, and seldom carefree. A girl soon became a woman, became a wife, and became a mother, usually before the end of her teens.

Suddenly the ringing of the village alarm bell broke the girls' revelry, and then their father was charging towards them from the nearer of their fields. He'd been shouting for them to come to the house and they'd hesitantly started on their way towards home. Not fast enough for Herodotus though. By the gods, why couldn't he have had two sons?

The panicky man had snatched up one daughter under each arm and fled for home. Gabrielle and Lila had dangled like sacks, wedged between his coarse-shirted ribs and the crooks of his elbows, bouncing with every jerky stride. Lila had immediately burst into tears. Gabrielle, older and of a different temperament, had tried to ask her father why. All she'd gotten from him, between agonized gasps for air, was that the army of a warlord was nearing the village. This warlord was unknown, and might not be above taking and selling his little girls into slavery. Then he'd gone on a jag of curses, directed at warriors in general, that both girls had heard often enough before. His words came in vehement spurts between inhalations. When he'd finally made it to the house, instead of going inside, he'd dragged the two sisters into the root cellar where their mother was already waiting, wringing her hands and cringing in fear.

Hecuba had gathered her daughters to her, squeezing them more tightly than their father. Gabrielle had barely been able to breathe. Lila hadn't stopped crying.

Their father had gathered his family in the embrace of his long arms and begun a non-stop litany of prayers. Gabrielle had chronicled the experience along with the rest of her childhood, filing it away to examine later. Among the things she'd recall was her father's words beseeching the goddesses Hestia and Demeter to protect them.

"_Preserver of Hearth and Home, Goddess of the Harvest, save us from pillage and death at the hands of Xena's army. We're honest people who honor your gifts and lead simple, peaceful lives. We work hard tilling the earth and raising our families. We make offerings of our first harvests at your temples and give thanks in our homes. Please, save us today."_

And somehow they had been saved. The army had ridden past Potidaea without stopping, but no one had been about to see it. The streets and the fields had lain quiet and deserted. Nothing had stirred as the line of warriors marched past the village. At their head, an angry woman of 19 had felt the tickle of guilt. A simple village, much smaller than her home city of Amphipolis, had reacted to her presence with terror, just like her kinsfolk had reacted to the coming of Cortese a couple of years before.

Here though, there was no militia and no hotheaded young woman to lead the farmers to resist. She'd vacillated between burning the place in contempt and sparing it for mercy's sake. In the end, haste and training had made up her mind. She'd wanted to get to Scione, at the tip of Chalcidice's Pallene Peninsula, to take a pirate's ships for her army. And the recent lessons from her mentor, Mithridates, reminded her that these fields might support her troops some day, and would support those who would feed her in the meantime. By doing nothing now, she would lessen the peasants' antipathy towards her in the future. Where she'd obeyed expedience, they had perceived mercy. She'd passed Potidaea by that day and left it untouched.

At her closest approach, Xena had been within a furlong of the root cellar where Herodotus' family lay hidden. Xena had felt nothing, for her heart and soul were preoccupied with her strategies: Scione, the ships, and then Corinth, gateway to Attica and Boetia. But Gabrielle had felt. Nervous energy that came from the close presence of a dangerous power, yet with a foreshadowing of some inexplicable sense of safety she couldn't understand. She'd felt no personal threat from the army passing by and she hadn't been sure why. Everyone else had certainly felt threatened. Only six feet of dirt and some wooden boards had hidden them, their mighty fortress, and it was a sham built mostly on the hopes of an ignorant farmer. It wouldn't have saved them for two heartbeats. No, it had been something else. At that time, Gabrielle had thought that maybe it was the Goddess Hestia calming her, an innocent, in her own home. Years later, she would suspect that it had been Fate.

Maybe she'd still remembered that sensation six years later when she was saved from slavers by an unknown warrior woman. Maybe she'd felt it when she talked with the warrior afterwards. And when she'd found out that her savior was the very same warlord who had once spared their village, maybe she remembered that feeling of safety she'd experienced so unexpectedly as a girl. Maybe she remembered not feeling the threat everyone else had felt, for she certainly didn't feel it on that day when Xena had first entered her life as a real person.

Each of her did remember it now as they stood at the railings of 203 little wooden ships. They could easily believe that the great black fish had passed their boats by and gone off to fight another enemy, just as Xena's first army had passed her village by once long ago. Now the warfish lay still, just as powerful and just as capable of violence, but not directed at her. Every one of the 8,000 clones would have bet that if she'd stepped aboard that sub, she'd have found Xena in command. Each of her continued to watch, their nervousness replaced by anticipation.

Twenty minutes passed after the sub's leap to the surface, and nothing changed. Then there was movement in the distance, just the barest impression of ghostly black racing under the moon. They heard a soft droning whine accompanying a specter that was moving towards them at a phenomenal speed. Surely no ship could sail so fast! Yet it sailed ever closer, and soon they saw that it was a black ship that skimmed above the waves on stilts! It approached the submarine in a long, graceful curve, slowing as it did, and finally sinking its hull into the sea. Now it moved like a normal boat, finally coming alongside the sub and tying off to her so that the pair rode the swells tethered together much like their own myriad craft. As the Gabrielles watched, their eyes riveted with intense interest, they thanked Selene for her moonlight.

From a distance of a mile and a quarter, it should have been impossible for the Gabrielles to see any details of the figures that emerged from the top of the sub's sail. It should have been equally impossible for them to recognize anything about the figures from the stilt-boat that met them on their deck. But somehow the Gabrielles saw with a sense other than vision. It was Xena! In fact, four Xenas! The Xenas greeted each other, met in a small group and talked, then cast off their lines and returned to their ships. Up on the sail, one figure seemed to hesitate, perhaps even staring towards them, before disappearing again within the submarine.

The stilt-boat moved away first. It shaped a course arcing away from the sub, accelerating until its hull lifted from the water, and then it leaped forward to an unnatural speed, accompanied again by that droning whine. The boat continued its arc, spiraling in to a distance of a quarter-mile and circling the Gabrielles. They waved. But the stilt-boat didn't stop or slow its pace, nor did it return any greeting. It continued to complete its survey and then it sped off to the north from whence it had come.

Then the submarine simply sank out of sight. It too had never signaled them or acknowledged them in any way. If the vessels had been crewed by Xena, or many Xenas, they didn't stop for the Gabrielles. Instead, they passed them by like Xena the warlord had passed by the village of Potidaea. The Gabrielles were silent and sadly disappointed. Had the soulmates they'd just spent the past 4 months, the entirety of their current lives, journeying to find just declined to be reunited? That thought hurt. And yet, perhaps Xena wasn't ready for that reunion yet.

Fate again. Long ago, Xena had ridden within 220 yards of her beloved, but the time hadn't been right; they'd each had a road to travel before they'd be ready for the meeting that would change them both forever. Perhaps the same was true on this night. The Gabrielles had to content themselves with the "almost certainty" that their soulmate lived. But that soulmate was at war. Those ships they'd seen were warships, as surely as anything the Gabrielles could imagine. And each of them recalled their last words from a previous life.

_"No, Xena. Not yet...still a battle to fight...now I know why I...I wasn't in Ares' vision..."_

_We knew thee of old,_

_Oh, divinely restored,_

_By the lights of thine eyes_

_And the light of thy Sword_

_From the graves of our slain_

_Shall thy valour prevail_

_As we greet thee again-_

_Hail, Liberty ! Hail !_

_(Partial lyric from the modern _"National Anthem of Greece"

_**April 24, 2006 – The Strymon Vale, Macedonia**_

"Total enemy casualties?" Xena asked, her voice cold with command.

"Estimated at 31,200 dead, count of the wounded, unknown," Prima reported.

The Destroyer of Nations had returned to Amphipolis with her troops late the night before. Most of the troops from Chalcidice had come back earlier, in the afternoon of the 23rd. The _hecatontarchea_ in command of the Miss Artiphys had reported in around midnight, and Secunda had finally returned in the early hours of the morning. Now the _strategos_ was holding her morning briefing, at sunup, as was her custom. She, the two "specials", and the eight _chiliarchoi_ were gathered in her command tent on the hill overlooking the army's encampment along the Strymon River.

"And our own casualties?"

"51 dead, 107 wounded, _Strategos_," a _chiliarchos_ announced.

"Good work," Xena stated, "a kill ratio of 612 to 1. This has been a successful opening engagement against Athena's forces. Her uninspired three-pronged strategy failed because of our vigilance. She was trying to entrap and destroy us with sheer numbers of troops, and we defeated her with technology...beat her at her own game. Now I've challenged 'em to fight face to face the old way.

We know that 4,800 troops survived the battle to the north. A few may have survived in Chalcidice as well. I have foreseen us in battle against 24,000, so about 19,000 of Athena's soldiers are unaccounted for. Double the scouts. I want them found."

A chorus of, "Yes, _Strategos_," came from the loyal officers and she dismissed the meeting.

After they had gone, Xena sat in the chair at her desk, her mind occupied deep in thought. The _hecatontarchea_ who had commanded the Miss Artiphys had brought back a disturbing intelligence report. Xena wasn't sure of what to make of it, yet. A flotsam of junk sailboats was headed their way bearing a suspected 8,000 clones of Gabrielle. Her immediate suspicion was that these were a component of the missing 19,000 that Athena still had in reserve, but the behavior of the Los Angeles class sub that the Argo had destroyed brought that assumption under doubt. Why would Athena want to destroy the Gabrielles if she had created them in the first place? Why go to so much trouble and not deploy them as a weapon? Athena's strategy...she sought understanding in conjecture.

They could have rebelled against the goddess and gone AWOL because of some inbred loyalty to their soulmate or some aversion to serving the enemy that the original Gabrielle clone had first discerned years ago back in Columbia. They could have been cleverly conceived pawns in Athena's strategies, bred like the clone in the lab in Washington, D.C., simply to be slain en mass for Xena's torment. It would explain why the Los Angeles had ignored the Argo. Or they could have been threatened by the Los Angeles, which was sacrificed to gain the Destroyer's confidence in their independence, and once accepted as allies, would be in a position to strike her at a crucial moment. Or they could be something else so unforeseen that their threat wasn't subject to calculation. Perhaps they'd been cross-programmed, their downloads aberrant, containing the memories of someone else. Callisto's mind and memories in Gabrielle's skin? Xena cringed at the possibility, and yet she knew it was possible with clones.

But what if they weren't Athena's tools? What force besides Athena could have created the Gabrielles in that case? On this point rested all her suspicions. Athena had created one Gabrielle, and so she could create more. She had demonstrated that capability. She had access to the bard's genes. In this world, only one other group had mass-produced clones...Omega Sector. Here she paused to review her memories, dredging them up with her eidetic recall.

_Xena lay Gabrielle's body down with the kranos below her feet but said no farewell, then she lit the pyre and watched the creeping flames engulf the logs, wrapping the body of her beloved bard as if in the blanket of her love. Xena's clone stood silent, for once not singing the requiem, but simply stroking the lock of Gabrielle's hair that she had cut, endlessly through her fingers._ What had happened to that lock of hair, she wondered?

It had been taken from her before her questioning by the detectives in the Columbia police station. She'd been so preoccupied that she'd barely noticed. It would have been among the lots of evidence handed over to Harry and Al when they'd come to rescue her.

_Even when Harry Tasker entered the room, the FBI ID badge hanging from the pocket of his suit jacket, she only gave a slight twitch of her left eyebrow in recognition. When the four Special Services officers surrounded her, she got up and followed them out in silence. Within minutes, Harry rejoined them, carrying a stack of cassettes. Shortly later Al and the other four operatives joined them, carrying a box holding bagged evidence and folders of notes. _It must have been there amongst the evidence!

In all the time since, why hadn't she remembered the lock of hair that she'd cut from Gabrielle's head before laying her on the pyre? Why hadn't she suspected the ever-crafty agent who'd initially had reservations about cloning her army? He'd had obvious doubts about turning her loose with such a force. He'd been horrified by her alliance with Dr. Kishihara and the creation of Prima and Secunda. And then, there had been his boss, Spencer Trilby. The man had acted passively during their meetings, allowing Harry and Al to handle her, but he'd always been present in their headquarters and sat in at their meetings. The man had "fox" written all over him. He was a survivor who'd managed to stay alive for decades in the twilight world of espionage, a world with few elders and a short life expectancy. Why had she not suspected him? Had she thought that her requests were sufficient to keep Omega Sector focused and busy? Had she simply been too preoccupied to think laterally? The flowcharts of Mithridates would have predicted a threat from within her organization, and none had surfaced. She should have been much more suspicious of her "allies". It was far too late now.

So Omega Sector too had been capable of cloning the Gabrielles. Now, she had no way to be certain of their origin. Omega Sector was gone, along with Washington, D.C., or was it? She hadn't even ordered Secunda's troops to check and make sure during their occupation of the Capitol City. Her strategic lapses were coming to light as they always did in hindsight and it annoyed her. Now there were possibilities to examine and plans to be made. There were contingencies to be developed.

For a moment she toyed with the idea of seeking out and enlisting the Gabrielles. 8,000 of them would be a potent addition to her forces. Perhaps she could contrive to use them. But these Gabrielles were an unknown. They could be the best of allies, but they could also become the perfect weapons against her. She could not afford such a gamble now. This was not her Gabrielle. She was not the clone who had come to life beside her in Alti's lab and died in Columbia years ago. These were strange clones wearing a familiar face, and she couldn't know what had been downloaded into them or how their genes had been modified. They had not appeared in Ares' vision. No, she could not take the chance. There could be no trust. Her army would have no contact with them at least until after the final battle and Athena's defeat.

So what was the worst that could happen afterwards? That these Gabrielles would try to rise up and defeat her? The blonde had never been the equal of the Destroyer of Nations. And yet, Athena would be dead. The world would be in ruins. Leaving the globe under the rule of 8,000 Gabrielles might be better than what would come to be under her hand as the Conqueror. Had that been Spencer Trilby's plan? The Hellene's Bane smiled a cold smile to herself. She could almost agree with the old man's reasoning. Almost.

Given the necessity, she would kill them all. This was not 73 BC and she could not again abdicate her destiny. She had walked that path of denial, the path of the Warrior Princess, and it had led to years of anguish, frustration, and finally, an ignominious death. Now she would walk the path that she had turned from when she'd disbanded her army. She would walk the path of the Conqueror.

This world had never seen her like, a living demigoddess and daughter of war, not in Alexander, nor even in Caesar himself. Once in command, she would never relinquish the fruits of her victory. She was the Chosen of Ares, Blessed by the God of War, and she was fighting in his name. Xena would be satisfied with her revenge, but once that was done, Ares' Favorite was bound to represent her god on earth. She would be the God of War's mortal emissary for the rest of her days. This was her destiny. She'd accepted it back in Columbia on a November night in 2001 as she'd committed her soulmate to the pyre, and she accepted it now.

Would Gabrielle oppose her in the role of Conqueror? She had ever kept the Destroyer at bay during their earlier life. Would she join me now under those conditions, Xena asked herself? In all honesty, she had to admit that no, the bard would not. The empire to come would be built on force and martial power, and the unfettered exercise of her will. The Greater Good would have little place in it. No, sooner or later she will come to oppose me, Xena admitted. And with that, she remembered a scene from the TV show, Hercules, which they'd seen and laughed about years ago.

_Armageddon Now._

"_Put her on the cross," the Conqueror ordered, and it was done. Then as she turned away, back to her lonely throne, she casually tossed over her shoulder, "break her legs."_

_No one would stand against the Conqueror of the Known World. In Ares' name, and by the will of the Destroyer of Nations, no dissent would be tolerated. When subversives were discovered in her realm, an example would be made. She didn't even flinch as the mallet slammed home and the "voice of the people" screamed in pain._

A road appeared in her mind's eye, leading to the Colosseum of Rome. It looked as it had in 44 BC, on the Ides of March when the soulmates and their enemy had died. Yet on this day, she herself occupied the royal box, and she had come to witness the sport. Along the avenue outside, circling the massive building and stretching for a mile facing each other across the Via Sacra between the Colosseum and the Forum of Rome, stood rows of crosses. From each cross, hung the limp body of a blonde woman, her blood painting the timbers as it trickled from her broken legs. Crows waited impatiently.

Xena shook herself out of her fatalistic ruminations. Taking inspiration or foresight from a TV show was simply pointless. She shelved the images and stood up from her desk, then walked around it and exited the tent. Below her in the Strymon Vale, the army was holding its morning mess. Troops were consuming rations and bands of mounted scouts were changing duties. The Destroyer of Nations started down the hill. Even a future Conqueror had to eat.

The morning passed, giving way to afternoon as Helios waded through the sky. Clouds came and went like the lost nations of the past, driven by breezes that could have been the tides of war. The scouts had spread throughout the surrounding territory, extending their range in a circle of 100 miles on horseback and 40 miles on foot. Reports began trickling in by mid-afternoon, but they spoke of nothing new. From the coast came the unexpected and continued word of no sighting of the Gabrielles.

The Destroyer of Nations had quickly plotted their coarse and speed from the report the _hecatontarchea_ had delivered. They had been 65 miles off shore and moving northwest at 4 knots. They should have been in sight of land within 16 hours, but that time had passed yesterday afternoon. Where had they gone? Their absence now was as troubling as their appearance had been the day before yesterday. Both were unexpected, and the unexpected in war was usually bad. Somewhere out there were 8,000 wild cards whose intentions were unknown.

Xena briefly contemplated the possibility of having to fight a two-fronted war, against Athena's troops and the Gabrielles. It could be disastrous. The appearance of the 8,000 blondes would have a profound effect on her army, breaking their concentration as they tried to come to terms with the existance of soulmates they knew only from memory. Those memories would argue for trust that the realities of the situation couldn't allow. If they marched onto the battlefield they could turn the tide of the conflict against the Destroyer. Each of her clones would be fighting herself at a time when they needed to be single-mindedly focused on fighting their enemy.

Now that the Gabrielles' position was unknown, Xena couldn't even monitor them. She couldn't predict their actions or counteract their threat. They had to be found as surely as Athena's troops. But what could she do once they were found? She was fresh out of atomic bombs though she did still have plagues.

Through the rest of the day Xena waited for word that the scouts had discovered Athena's hidden troops. By now, those who had survived her ambush would be on the move again as part of some contingency plan. She had no doubt that the Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare had more than one strategic option, and like any good general, could segue from her primary plan to her backup.

As she waited, Xena reviewed the map on her desk. She saw the lands in her mind's eye, grid square by grid square, mile by mile, until she had refreshed her knowledge of a block, 100 miles per side, that had once been her home territory. These lands around Amphipolis and the Strymon Vale had been her the base of her power as a warlord, and it had been from that part of Thrace that she had once moved to conquer Greece.

Throughout the afternoon and evening, reports came back from the scouts, but these were only repetitions of what had already been heard. No enemy forces had been sighted. No troop movements had been discovered. There was no sign of the enemy, and there was no sign of the Gabrielles. Night approached and the Destroyer of Nations, twitchy and having nothing else to do, contented herself with sword drills.

She began in the gloaming hour, as Helios sank and reddened the hilltop with a bloody light. Her shadow elongated, wraithlike, to stretch eastwards towards the highlands that had backed her home _polis_ during her original life. Here, a furlong and a half from her tent, was a height that overlooked the river, the place were she had first learned her sword drills with her brothers. They had begun their training under the tutelage of a hometown childhood hero, one Meleager the Mighty, a flea-bitten alcoholic who owned a real sword and had once seen battle. That had been in 84 BC, a year before their "hero" fell to his death while drunk, off the very same cliff where they trained.

Xena had returned to this spot many times during her original life, seeking the solace of earlier times and a shroud of concentration that lifted her spirit from the blood of war to the purity that she found in controlled physical movement. Here she submerged herself in the discipline of her chosen weapon and integrated the growing repertoire of techniques that she had accumulated.

The first sword drill took her back to her years as a teen, before she had ever raised a sword in anger. The simple, basic movements were designed to hone the body's strength and coordination in a novice _machairophoros_. The overhead strike, swinging parry, cross and horizontal slashes, and straight thrust. She could still hear Meleager's gruff baritone. _Advance with your attacks but never allow your stance to become unbalanced by overcommitment_; moving her feet to advance her body's center of gravity, and never leaning beyond that center of gravity even during a lunge. _Parry from the inside to the outside with the flat of the blade to preserve the cutting edges; _always redirecting the enemy's blade away from her body. _Shift your weight back to absorb a blow. The legs are like springs. Never meet the enemy flat-footed, avoid crossing your feet, watch the hips and shoulders, the eyes can lie. _ Xena recalled the timeless wisdom of her first lessons. She made the same movements that she had learned almost 2,100 years before, but now she moved with the fluidity and assurance of a master. She moved at combat speed as the last rays painted her sword with the colors of spilled blood, arterial bright as she began, deepening to venous rust, and finally falling to scab-black as Apollo's chariot fled the sky. The drill finally ended with the stillness following the kill.

In the new-fallen darkness Xena immediately began the second drill, a training exercise for the close-quarters fighting of the _euzonos_ or_ psilos_, (the light infantryman), and the Roman _velites,_ (legionary skirmishers), that she had learned in her first months serving Mithridates. She practiced the fluid transitions and continuous movements necessary to a frontline fighter clashing with similarly armed enemies in advance of the heavy infantry lines. Xena slipped past a row of imaginary foes, slashing, sidestepping, and feinting. _Always move, never stop or you become an easy target, always make the decisive stroke first, and remain unpredictable. _One attack blended into the next so that her momentum never faltered, turning her into a vicious close-in killing machine. Here assurance and speed counted. _Wound the foe, kill 'em if you can, but always keep moving. You're a shock troop; don't worry about a clean kill, someone behind will finish 'em off with their buttspike. Just keep advancing, be unrelenting, run 'em over and mow 'em down. No fatigue, no thinking, and no mercy._

She had been at it full speed for a quarter of an hour. A normal human would have been collapsing in exhaustion. Xena's skin showed only a slight sheen of sweat. Her breathing was elevated but controlled. She was reaching her second wind, after her body had processed the energy already in her blood, and her metabolism switched over to tap that which had been stored. The Destroyer of Nations reaped the benefits of her ancient and divine genetic mutation. When she was done she moved on to a third exercise, much more advanced, much more demanding, and much more personal.

This was the sword drill that she had never finished composing. She had added to it and refined it up until her last mission in Rome. Over the years she had spent countless candlemarks contemplating the movements and weighing the efficacy of the techniques. For a long time, she had been the only warrior capable of performing it. Once she had hoped to bequeath this knowledge to both her own daughter, and Gabrielle's. In the end, it had died with her on the cross.

Now she moved through the opening series, "_The Annihilation of the Line"_, designed to destroy a linear formation regardless of the number of enemies that made it up. Based on the truth that an effective line can only face one way, the movements of tracking her body caused the linear order to fail, and with it, the threat of the line. A variable sequence of aerial maneuvers allowed her to strike down every third and fourth soldier out of five. While those between turned to follow her progress, they hindered each other's readiness. After engaging a series of ten, she backtracked to slay each first and fifth, then moved on to the next ten in the line. All the while, the line would be trying to compensate, to track and attack her, but their very deployment order and numerical advantage hindered them. The unpredictable and unrelenting aggression of the _euzonos_ combined with the aerial fighting of Indus and Chin and her personal speed made her an almost impossible target for heavy infantrymen encumbered with shields, armor, and spears. In applied situations, she had actually witnessed soldiers wounding their comrades in their confusion. She carried the drill on for what would have been a line of 40, a common _ektaxis_, or battle order, for one _centuria._

Without a break, the switched to the second series, _"The Smashing of the Wheel"_, used to overcome encircling foes numbering five and up. These were often the surviving second soldier of each five in the annihilated line. In this drill she fought, sword in her right hand, chakram in her left, using both weapons to parry and strike. Her attacks progressed as if she were rebounding within the wheel's circumference, focussing in an evolution at 120º intervals, killing one and wounding the one adjacent before turning to those a third of the circle away. Thrust, cut, turn, two strides, slash, thrust, turn, three strides, backslash, front slash, leaping back somersault, slash, thrust, flip and repeat. Sometimes she moved clockwise, at other times widdershins, striking with unexpected combinations of her two weapons and immediately moving on. Again, she fought an imaginary 40, tallying the wounded with the dead and finishing them off in her mind with strokes appropriate to their injuries.

And finally, she moved to the third drill, _"Katalepsis"_. When she had first created this drill, she had allowed the Destroyer a brief sojourn to celebrate her battle frenzy. Later, after Indus, it had come to mean the honing of her Way. What had started as an offering to Ares had progressed to an avowal of her dedication to the warrior's path. Now, as the Destroyer of Nations, the exercise had ascended to the sublime.

Here the finest warrior of her age unleashed her skill with the subconscious mastery of _no mind_. The spirit alone guided her hands and her weapons. Flawless instinct, supernatural intuition. The body she had trained for a lifetime, the reflexes honed by decades of fighting, and a soul divorced from moral restraints melded in an unremitting and merciless outpouring of martial energy that brought lightning-quick death to all quarters. Each progression was aimed for a kill, each movement set up another even as it accomplished its task with the highest possible efficiency. Stroke for stroke, _"Katalepsis"_ had the highest killing return of any battle tactic in hand to hand combat. Even Gabrielle, after a lifetime spent training against this very warrior, would have been cut down in moments. Though she could spar toe to toe with the Warrior Princess, the blonde had never been the equal of the Destroyer of Nations.

When she was still again at last, a hundred lay dead in her mind's eye. She saw every one of them with perfect clarity, recalled their death strokes exactly, and she could find no more efficient way to have slain them. Tonight she could even smell their shed blood in the air. And she knew that on this night, she had performed the _"Katalepsis"_ for the first time without a single flaw. For the first time, she was truly the Destroyer of Nations.

Xena left the hilltop and made her way back to her army. Along the way she stopped at the stream that had once been so much larger. It was a tributary that ran down from the highlands behind where the city had once stood, and in that time, had contributed to its water supply. Now it was reduced to a small lively rill, but she had seen the place where it widened above a boulder on her way to practice. Now she stripped off her uniform and walked unhesitatingly in. The cool water came only to her mid-thigh, but she sank down and sat, then stretched back and let it cover her. For ten minutes she stayed in the water. She submerged completely for five minutes and sank into a transcendental state just to relax. When she finally rose and walked from the stream, she flicked the droplets from her skin, stood under the moon to dry, and then dressed and headed back to her tent.

In the darkness on the clifftop where Xena had practiced her drills, a shadow separated itself from the tree line a scant dozen yards away. Though she had followed Xena from her tent, she had projected no foreign energy and had remained undetected. To her, Xena was "near-self", closer to the "I" that she was than the "they" that described even her fellow clones. Only her "identical twin" was equally close. The shadow walked to the place Xena had vacated and stood absolutely still. For long moments she absorbed the energy of the night, the atmosphere of the place, and her memories of the Destroyer's movements. To her, that timespan felt like an hour. Eventually she heard Xena leave her bath and dress. And then she drew her sword and began the first drill.

She worked from her memories, tapping them directly and applying what had been dormant there. Converting her memories into actions took so little time that to the naked eye, she appeared to be executing a sequence of movements learned through a lifetime of practice. When she completed the _machairophoros_ drill, she continued with the Mithridatic _euzonos_ exercises, and these too she performed in every way identical to the Destroyer. And finally she moved on to Xena's personal training regimen. _"The Annihilation of the Line", "The Smashing of the Wheel", _and at last the _"Katalepsis"_, all indistinguishable from what Xena herself had done. All were performed with technical perfection and kinship of spirit.

The workout took her forty-five minutes, just as it had for Xena. It would have brought a mortal aerobics instructor past the point of collapse. After a two-minute break, she began again. This time, she worked at her own speed, the movements internalized now and performed with no conscious thought. Under the glow of the moon and stars, a display of mastery never imagined in this world came to life. Silver reflections flickered pale on her blade as it wove through the air too fast for mortal eyes to follow. For all practical purposes it was cloaked by its speed, invisible and unavoidable. The movements became a whirlwind, the actions compressed, and the imaginary enemies fell. No mortal warrior could have withstood this onslaught. The human capacity to process visual information rendered a timely response physically impossible. Defense was beyond the limits of the human reflex arc's minimum reaction threshold. Neither one nor a hundred could have preserved their lives though they faced only a single warrior.

The ten-minute _machairophoros _drill passed in three minutes and a handful of seconds. The _euzonos _drill in five rather than Xena's fifteen. _"The Annihilation of the Line", "The Smashing of the Wheel", _and finally, _"Katalepsis",_ she completed in just over seven minutes. She fought in silence, only the whistling of her sword and chakram singing in the night air. In a hair over fifteen minutes she made every move that had taken Xena forty-five. In that quarter-hour she slew an imaginary 221 foes.

After only a short break, she moved again to the _"Katalepsis"_, but this time there were differences, though no human eye was capable of following them. Blessed with inhuman abilities, Prima had found that certain of Xena's moves were unnecessary when fighting at her speeds. There were more efficient ways to slay a hundred when you could move at 150 feet per second. She split skulls on her backswings, outpacing the reflexes of enemies that would have jerked away or parried at normal human speeds. With a twist of her wrist she could cut the throat of a foe that couldn't be slain by a blade wielded in a normal mortal's hands. Often she opted for strikes rather than parries. Prima found that she could slay the hundred with seventy-six fewer moves than her _strategos_, for not only could she capitalize by striking multiple targets with the same stroke, but she could also negate the need for many of Xena's defenses.

When she finished this time, she sheathed her sword and returned to camp. A quick dip in the river washed away her sweat. At no time did she revel in her mastery or make value comparisons between herself and her general. Her concept of self didn't allow for that. One thought alone presented itself. _When the time comes, I will be ready, for no one, not even a god, can withstand those techniques at those speeds._ Finally she headed towards the army's mess tents, seeking food to replenish the vast quantities of energy she had expended.

**Continued in Chapter 9**

75


	9. Clonefic Part 3 Chapter 9

**Clonefic Part 3 – Chapter 9**

_**April 23, 2006 – The Actean Peninsula, Chalcidice**_

It was morning after they'd seen the submarine battle and gained a fairly good assurance that Xena, (and perhaps more than one Xena), was alive and at war. That night, after the stilt-boat had zipped off to the north and the sub had sunken out of sight without a single Xena so much as telling them to, "wait right here until I get back", the Gabrielles had realized that they needed to make some decisions.

Their course had been for Amphipolis by way of the mouth of the Strymon River, and their intention had been to find their soulmate(s). But their soulmates had seen them and not chosen to greet or meet. That had hurt, but after they'd gotten past their disappointment, the practical reasons for such behavior became a cause for concern.

The Xenas in the submarine boat had blown something up right before their craft had half-leapt from the water. Even worse, a couple hours before that, someone had set off an atomic bomb. The Gabrielles had not a single weapon among them. They had to question the wisdom of just sailing directly into a war zone. This was even more true since one army probably belonged to the Destroyer of Nations with Ares' Blessing, and the other was loyal to the Goddess of War. It was literally a sibling rivalry of Olympian dimensions. Outsiders were almost certainly unwelcome. In fact the more they'd thought about it, (and being Gabrielles), the more they'd talked about it, the more it became obvious that they needed an alternative plan. They hadn't come all the way from Olduvai Gorge to get nuked, and so they considered the geography.

To the east lay the width of the Aegean, all the way to Samothrace, Imbros, and the Dardanelles. To the west lay the peninsula of Acte, or Athos, the easternmost peninsula of Chalcidice. The Gabrielles remembered Acte. Back in her time it had been mostly deserted. Unlike the Pallene, which was relatively flat and fertile, or Sithonia that had at least rated a coastal road, Acte was mountainous right down to its shores. There was almost no arable land. Mountains rose straight from the water, and the peninsula's interior was just more of the same, with steep, pine-dotted peak after peak. In her time, the Acte road had stopped at Acanthus, where the peninsula joined the mainland, and only a few outlaws and crazy ascetics on the backs of donkeys had ventured down narrow paths further south.

The Gabrielles had no idea what was there now, but it couldn't be much. Acte was probably still isolated, marginal terrain, sparsely populated and unwatched. It could be the perfect place to hide out, and it could provide a route, though admittedly a difficult one, through Chalcidice to Macedonia and the Strymon. There was nothing for them in Turkey, and so after a short debate, they turned their flotilla of wooden ships to the west at 2300 hours.

Making their constant 4 knots, the 203 ships covered the roughly 25 miles to the coast in a creaking and gently bobbing six hours. They dropped their anchors in the shallows just off shore at 0500 and promptly went to sleep, intending to wake at dawn when they would be able to assess the land. They had arrived about 5 miles north of Mt. Athos, which rose to 6,670 feet at the southeastern tip of the peninsula. Ashore lay a narrow vale between mountains of lesser height, and nestled on a forested slope above its mouth sat the Holy Monastery of Karakalos.

The dawn of April 23rd slipped across the water and lightened the rising mountains, throwing harsh shadows inland from the coast. Somewhere in the monastery a bell pealed, calling the brothers within to their morning devotions. Upon the water, 8,000 Gabrielles stretched, yawned, and reluctantly left behind a woefully inadequate period of sleep. They rubbed reddened eyes, fluffed sleep compressed locks, and resettled their clothing. Finally they grudgingly appraised the all to quickly brightening sky.

The sun had painted the monastery walls with reds and oranges that progressed in a quarter-hour to gold. A thin column of smoke rose from a cook fire in a kitchen somewhere within the walls. It was the only thing that moved.

The Gabrielles noted that the monastery looked like nothing more than a small castle. In fact they had no idea that it was a monastery at all, and experience led them to assume that it was an isolated and fortified town. Around it, the trees had been cut back for a furlong to prevent approach by stealth. There was a tall wall of gray stone rising about four floors high, topped with two stories of windowed buildings built flush to the wall and even overhanging it in places. A lower section at one end, perhaps enclosing an entrance yard, presented the crenellated top of a typical battlement. From that end rose a keep, a square tower another four stories high.

Outside the wall stood a few buildings of the same austere architecture and constructed from the same gray stone. A road led between these and the castle, approaching it from the end with the crenellated battlement. In their mind's eyes, the Gabrielles could imagine the strong gate that faced the buildings from the wall. The road would lead directly to it, probably ending with a paved square.

The structure could have been 100 years old or 2,000. The style, materials, and function were familiar. Here, an outpost of civilization had fortified itself against pirates, invading armies, and warlords. The choice of such a remote location bespoke either banishment of the inhabitants from the world, or rejection by the inhabitants of the world. This conclusion was supported by a complete lack of any boats or ships other than their own. This was not a trading post or a commercial port. Nor could they see no any farms or homesteads on the surrounding slopes. They saw no people, no livestock or flocks. Nothing moved in the castle or among the outlying buildings. No heraldic banners or colorful pennants fluttered above the keep. No sounds carried across the water to their ears. Save for the column of smoke and the bell, the place might have been deserted.

The Gabrielles decided the chances were very good that this was a remote military outpost or the somber lair of a petty despot. It seemed suffused with a guarded peace and a cheerless character, and while relatively safe, it would be a dismal place to serve or live. The blonde clones were all momentarily saddened by the thought that any children unlucky enough to call the castle home were probably miserable.

The Gabrielles had little doubt that their armada had been sighted from the keep and walls. Though they'd seen no lookouts and heard no alarms, only blindness would excuse ignorance of their presence. At this very moment, they imagined the inhabitants mustering and arming for a response to their threat. Here sat a small and isolated camp confronted by an unexpected armada that had arrived in the dead of night, potentially bearing many times the count of warriors such a place could house. Their boats bore no flags or identification declaring them either friend or foe. The castle would be awash with uncertainty, foreboding, and martial resolve. The Gabrielles expected, not a warm welcome, but a guarded if not paranoid reception at the points of spears.

Their only recourse was to appear before the gates unarmed, since they had no weapons anyway, and petition the inhabitants for information and safe passage through their lands. This became their plan, put forward, commented on, refined, and finally agreed to. To form a delegation, each of the 203 boats sent a representative ashore to make initial contact with those ensconced behind the walls. These chosen clones picked their way across a narrow, rocky shore to the base of the road, and then set off for the castle a half-mile away.

The 203 Gabrielles nervously walked up the road, looking around at the steep slopes closing in around them. They relished the feel of solid ground beneath their feet after all their time aboard ships on the water. Better still, this was Grecian soil, and the soil of her ancestral homeland of Chalcidice. Potidaea lay a scant 50 miles to the northwest, and though she'd never set foot on Acte, she felt a kinship to the land. All of her surveyed the "pelt of pines" that clothed the rising mountainsides. This too was familiar, typical of highlands throughout the Mediterranean where conditions supported vegetation with sufficient rainfall. Trees grew in the bottomlands as well, and these closed in alongside the road only a few dozen yards from the strand.

Sooner than she'd expected, the ascending road broke from the trees and entered the cleared furlong of land surrounding the castle. The Gabrielles looked up at the approaching fortress, expecting to see sentries pacing the walls, but they saw no one there at all. Again the thought that this place was deserted crossed their minds, but then, there was still that thin rising smoke from some cook fire, and at dawn they'd heard a single pealing bell.

The road finally crested the castle hill. The clones entered the paved square they'd expected to find and stood in uncertainty between the castle gate and the large building across from it. The building appeared just as empty and deserted as the castle. No sounds came from within. No faces peered from the windows. No figures moved anywhere in sight. Finally, seeing that they would get no welcome, the Gabrielles made their way to the gate.

Here they found a strange thing. Though they saw the expected massive wooden gate, reinforced with iron straps attached with rivets as thick as their wrists, it stood open and unguarded. Looking through the gate, they could see that the courtyard within was empty and the battlements deserted, leaving all wrapped in a pervasive silence.

Ghosts, they thought suddenly; a castle manned by the ghosts of some long defeated army and their massacred people. How sad. Such a thought was a reflex for their ancient souls. Perhaps only an errant breath of wind had rung the bell? Perhaps the smoke was spectral as well?

Fine, pale hairs rose on the backs of 203 necks. 203 tongues slipped out to lick suddenly dried lips. Vivid imaginations quickly populated the fortress with the restless shades of warriors, townsfolk, tradesmen, and children, all doomed in some undeterminable time long past. Now their discontented wraiths wandered the premises, reliving their defeat and enticing the living to join them forever in their lost home. Had Hades missed this enclave of recalcitrant souls? Did some other god hold jurisdiction over these dead?

Yet the shades of the deceased, scary as they were, could only freeze the heart and deceive the mind if the will allowed it. The best defense against the dead had always been courage. The Gabrielles swallowed and blinked, and then took deep calming breaths. 203 souls settled their hearts and renewed their resolve. 406 hands clenched and relaxed. 406 feet strode forward. The Gabrielles passed through the unguarded gate and entered the empty courtyard.

They had just drawn together in the center of the space when the bell began pealing. The doors of the keep swung open. _Well, here we go…but will it be an army of the living or the dead?_ The Gabrielles could barely contain their surprise when they found themselves confronted by a mere 30 very alive monks, bearded, capped, and robed, who had just completed their hour of silent prayers at the opening of the day. They appeared akin to figures from antiquity, though unfamiliar and more modern than her original self by perhaps a few hundred years. The monks were no less shocked by the appearance of the 203 Gabrielles. Smack dab in the center of their courtyard, stood a huge crowd of identical…women!

It was a toss up as to whether the Gabrielles' identical appearance or their sex was the greater initial shock. Karakalos was one of twenty monasteries that stood on the holy ground of Athos. Not a single one of them admitted women. Not as nuns, not as archeologists, not as guests…not for any reason. The purified ritual environment of these Eastern Orthodox monks of the Order of St. Basil included a tradition of non-contact with women in almost any context. Just about the only female figures present were the icons of the Virgin Mary and some images of St. Ann. There wasn't a single living woman on the entire peninsula. For wholly different reasons, this was a modern mirror image of the old Amazon lands…just as exclusive, just as traditional, and just as legitimate.

The monks stared at the Gabrielles in horrified fascination, and the Gabrielles stared back with relieved good will._ Like us, not a single weapon carried among them. Better yet, they're practically from our time. _The bell finished its tolling. Silence ruled in the courtyard for many minutes while no one moved. Finally a Gabrielle took a hesitant step forward and offered a salutation in ancient Greek.

"_On behalf of my sisters, I wish you peace. We request safe passage in these lands. We're looking for our soulmate. Maybe you've heard of her…Xena, the Favorite of Ares? The Destroyer of Nations?"_

Before she was halfway through, the Gabrielle suspected that the monks had a problem. Their facial expressions had progressed from shock to incredulity, and then to dismay. It hadn't occurred to her that the ancient word for "soulmate" had been generalized over the centuries into just another synonym for "lover". This lover was not only another woman, but worse, she was an important devotee of Ares, the pagan God of War. The monks couldn't be sure, but her other title, "The Destroyer of Nations", certainly had a Satanic ring to it. And her initial sentence had sounded like a mockery of an important benediction. All this was spoken in language akin to the old liturgy of the Byzantine Church. Despite their reaction, the Gabrielle cocked her head, blinked, and gave them a hopeful smile. To the monks, her mannerisms seemed blatantly coquettish.

Here then, a creature manifesting a sex whose presence was forbidden had spoken in the old holy language, blaspheming a phrase of blessing. She had declared her quest to find her lesbian lover whose allegiance was to a pagan god and perhaps the devil. Not only this, but she represented a cadre of identical creatures numbering many times their own count. Surely they were demons! And they were demons who intended to traipse around, spreading their corruption through the holy lands of Athos! The evil speaker had finished by displaying the provocative mannerisms of a harlot, tempting the brothers with an implied dalliance that threatened to become manifest by night in a succubus visitation.

In a thousand years of existance, the monastery had never endured so dire a threat. The place had been razed to the ground in the 13th century, and again in the 16th. Like the other Holy Monasteries of Athos, Karakalos had weathered attacks by Latins, pirates, and history's passing armies. The physical destruction and loss of life had been appalling, but the monks' devotion to God had never failed. They had always turned to their saints and their Savior for spiritual strength and then rebuilt their places of worship. For hundreds of years, the monasteries of Athos had remained places where the Holy Spirit prevailed. Throughout all their tests, the holy community had persevered in their isolation and immersion in the Word of God.

Now these 30 modern brothers had been sent a trial more egregiously evil than any that had befallen their order before. Here their sanctions had been disregarded, their words lampooned, and their flesh tempted. They were outnumbered by cunning and appealing demons, manifest in physically identical presences, who had declared blasphemies to their faces with utter disregard for the holy ground on which they stood or the beliefs they profaned. Most disturbing was their air of innocence and naivete, and their guise of good will. This was far more dangerous than any spitting, rancorous monstrosity armed with deadly weapons and displaying vicious malice. Evil clothed fair had always been the most nefarious of the devil's deceits, for it called out to the very spirit of Christian charity the monks worked to cultivate.

Breaking from his paralysis, the foremost monk thrust out his crucifix towards the demons as a shield. Seeing the crucifix, the Gabrielle who had spoken bent her right knee and crossed herself left to right as she had seen New World Catholics do somewhere, perhaps on TV. The brother recoiled. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, one crossed themself right shoulder to left. Though both the Eastern and Western Churches shared the words, _"In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen"_, the two groups each considered the other to be misguided if not outright hereticalEven worse, the Gabrielle had recited, _"Ateh Malkuth, ve Geburah, ve Gedulah, le Olam, Amen", _a phrase from Hebrew mysticism that was the only phrase Gabrielle knew that was accompanied by a gesture of crossing the body. Having died before the birth of Christ, it had been a gamble on her part.

_(Usually translated as, "Thou art the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, Unto the Ages, So be it". By crossing her body left to right, Gabrielle had conflicted her actions with her words. Malkuth, the Kingdom, is ascribed to the feet, while Geburah, or Strength, is ascribed to the right shoulder and Gedulah, to the left shoulder. In fact, this interpretation is based on a "mage's blind". Glory is actually ascribed to Hod and is signified by the right hip or thigh, while the attribute of Gedulah, or Chesed, at the left shoulder, is Mercy. A more correct translation would have been, "Thou art the Kingdom, and the Strength, and the Mercy, Unto the Ages, So be it.") Editor_

After processing their shock the monks galvanized their faith and began an energetic prayer. All pressed their hands together. All held up their crosses. All trained their eyes on the heavens. For the time being, they refused to even acknowledge the presence of the demons. They invoked the Holy Spirit to enter their souls, beseeched their Savior for protection, and called upon their Father in Heaven to grant them the strength to overcome temptation. The Gabrielles observed this behavior with curiosity and finally turned to comment among themselves.

"Well, I realize I didn't connect that well with them," the Gabrielle who had spoken for the group said as she shook her head, "but if I'd known that they're insane I'd have tried to understand their delusions and be more accommodating." She shrugged.

"You couldn't have known," a Gabrielle next to her offered. "Its not like the gate was locked or there was a caretaker here." She looked around just to double-check.

"She's right, Gabrielle," a third Gabrielle added as several others nodded in agreement, "don't blame yourself."

"I guess I feel like I should have known," the first clone said hesitantly, analyzing her feelings and looking back at the monks, "I mean, just look at them. It's so sad."

The other Gabrielles followed her gaze and regarded the brothers with pity. The "inmates" were deeply involved in a display of mass-hysteria, a shared delusion, abetted by their costumes and their isolation in this lonely asylum. Of course it was obvious…now. Hindsight always brought perfect clarity. Even the unguarded gate made a kind of sense. Where could they possibly go if they left?

The afflicted men didn't seem violent or dangerous. They'd just retreated from a modern world that the Gabrielles themselves found crazy, seeking relief in obsessive ritual and withdrawal. The clones were immediately reminded of the nervous flute player, Allan, who they'd first met in the Puddingstone State Re-Creation Area. Yes, it was very sad. The nearest Gabrielle gently rubbed the first Gabrielle's back and squeezed her shoulder in a comforting gesture of support.

"C'mon, let's go," the first Gabrielle said, "it's probably not good for them to be so upset." She had turned to face the others, but then she stopped and bit her lip and asked, "Do you think I should try to apologize?"

"To who?"

The first clone looked back at the monks. They were still praying and looking up at the sky. They weren't paying any attention to the clones at all. Apologizing probably wouldn't do any good, the first clone realized, but it probably wouldn't do any harm either. They probably wouldn't even listen, but at least it would make her feel better. She took a deep breath and walked over within a half-dozen paces of the monks.

"_I'm sorry if I've upset you," _she said, speaking ancient Greek again, and then, though they wouldn't understand, she added, _"We'll be leaving now, but I'd feel guilty if I didn't warn you that you're really close to a war zone here. We saw an atomic bomb go off nearby two days ago. I'm afraid it's the end of the world." _The last word out of her mouth had been _apokalupsis_: apocalypse

The Gabrielle turned away from the crowd of monks and never saw the looks of horror on their faces or noticed them stutter in their prayer. She rejoined her sisters and the group made their way out of the courtyard and through the gate. They walked across the square and started back down the road towards their ships. Sadly, they'd decided that the inmates and the asylum were probably a lost cause. Either the Destroyer of Nations or the Goddess of War would demolish this isolated site. The insanity of the monks reminded the Gabrielles of the hapless Joxer.

It had been in early in 70 BC, at the beginning of the soulmates' involvement in the Mitoan-Thessalian Conflict. Following almost a year of increasing tension, trade negotiations between the two long-term rivals had degenerated into warfare. At first it was only isolated raiding and a few skirmishes. The main armies hadn't met in combat yet. Xena had dragged Gabrielle along to answer a request for her aid from an old comrade, the self-promoted Mitoan General Marmax.

Marmax was, according to the Warrior Princess, an ambitious old pervert who had held the rank of _hecatontarchea, _or lieutenant in command of a hundred, in her army. She had flogged him several times for excessive blatancy when he'd engaged in nonconsensual carnal liaisons with young boys and girls. Still, his performance on the battlefield had been efficient and so she'd put up with his "foibles". The man had always prodded her to let him command a thousand, but Xena wouldn't make him a _chiliarchos_ because only similarly disposed warriors respected him enough to follow him into combat. She simply didn't have enough pedophiles in her army to man a whole _chiliarchia_.

His request for aid had come as a surprise, more because he'd managed to scam his way to the command of the Mitoan army than that he needed her help. Xena had been undecided for two days as to whether or not to answer his pleas, while Gabrielle had vehemently argued against going. Finally Xena had decided, after relating to her partner how the man had once contrived to cross an entire field of battle to reinforce her position after learning that enemy troops had been redeployed to cut her off. In fact, he had saved her life. And so Xena had dragged Gabrielle south across most of Macedonia, finally reaching the Mitoan positions in the foothills of the Pindus Mountains on the border of Thessaly. This had been in mid-February.

The soulmates had barely met with Marmax when his scouts reported that the Thessalian army was marching to engage them. Xena had shaken her head, but a sparkle of battle lust had lit her eyes. Gabrielle had noted Xena's expression with some trepidation, while Marmax had leered at the young blonde, even though at 18 she was a half-dozen years too old for his tastes.

The war began with massive casualties on both sides. Xena's tactics kept the Mitoans from being completely routed, but the Thessalians were too numerous. As the wounded streamed into the physicians' care, Gabrielle had made copious notes on Xena's medical techniques. It was at this time that the soulmates had made the acquaintance of Joxer.

The man had been a common soldier in the Mitoan ranks, drawn to the army from some sod farm by stupidity and the lure of glory. He had never been more than an idiot. A skull-cracking blow to the head from a mace had rendered him a complete imbecile. When he was dragged into surgery, Xena had simply plucked bone chips from his cranium, drained a subdural hematoma, and sewn up his scalp after patching his skull with part of a turtle shell. After a month of healing, some said he was unchanged, while others swore that he was actually smarter than before sustaining his head wound. Xena had noted his cleft palate during her surgery, recalled his almost microcephalous cranial architecture, and wasn't the least bit surprised when he manifested compulsions, obsessive behavior, and delusions of competence and adequacy following his recovery. She'd charitably termed him an amateur soldier.

_(Note that there was no term in ancient Greek for a non-professional, the closest word being "idiotes", which also denoted a moron or anyone of meager skills.) Editor_

Joxer fancied himself a great warrior and lady's man. That he was as uncoordinated as a six-legged calf and as handsome as Calaban made no difference. Upon discovering who had saved his life, he became enamoured of the Warrior Princess and relentlessly tagged along after her. Predictably, he soon became jealous of Gabrielle's close relationship to the object of his infatuation, and though Xena never gave him the slightest encouragement, he followed her like a shadow. Of course, being the grotesque that he was, he rapidly became the laughingstock of the Mitoan army. Predictably, he attributed the whispering and jeering at his expense to malicious rumors spread by Gabrielle, an aspiring bard. One night he'd denounced her at mess before the troops and had been shouted down with mockery and derision.

Gabrielle had been torn between feeling thanks for her vindication and sorrow at the pathetic man's condition. Between his delusions about her, Xena, and himself, his link to reality was tenuous at best. This was a very dangerous situation in the ancient world and worse in times of war. Joxer had been an accident waiting to happen, for he was little more than fodder for some vicious bully. His insistence on following Xena placed him in even more danger. For almost a month, he survived on luck. Eventually his luck ran out.

The Warrior Princess and her companion had discussed Joxer many times. Despite his antagonism, Gabrielle had asked her partner to look out for him more than once. Several times, Xena had put herself at risk to save him and she was more than sick of it. Joxer took each incident as proof of her devotion to him and became ever more convinced she'd soon be his. It was a comedy without a shred of humor.

Finally the inevitable happened. Even after browbeating him into staying in camp, Joxer had snuck out after Xena when she led a scouting party to gauge the enemy's deployment prior to an engagement. Gabrielle had discovered him missing and guessed what had happened. Xena would be livid if she found out.

In Xena's recounting of events, she seems to have granted the fool a commendable if wholly unintentional last combat performance. Because he was following behind the scouts, it was he alone who encountered and engaged a trio of Thessalian scouts. His unmistakable battle cry, described as imitative of a goose's call, rang through the woods along with the crash of bodies, screams, and cursing. Xena and her scouting party, the secrecy of their presence now completely compromised, had hastened to join the combat. When they'd arrived, Joxer was already dead. No surprise there. But along with him lay one enemy impaled on a spearshaft, one with a broken ankle, and a third knocked unconscious. Xena had interrogated the two survivors with the pinch.

The soldier with the broken ankle attested that a maniac had jumped them from the top of an embankment, knocking all three of them to the ground. He himself had sustained his injury in the fall, landing awkwardly on a cadaver in a trench. The dead man had fallen on the buttspike of a shattered spear and had died of the impalement. It had simply been bad luck. The man rendered unconscious had been the landing pad for their attacker, but he'd been carrying a battleaxe in his belt and this had cut their assailant's throat. Joxer had died with his head half-severed from his neck. Again, simply bad luck.

The scouts had returned to camp with the two prisoners and Joxer's body. He had been given a proper warrior's pyre, and more glory than anyone would have expected him to earn. The prisoners gave up the information the scouting party had originally sought, saving them from having to put themselves in danger in enemy territory.

"What a waste," Gabrielle had whispered as the soulmates watched Joxer's pyre.

"Best that coulda' happened to him," Xena had responded. "I'll remember the idiot."

Gabrielle had always suspected the veracity of the reports about the incident. It would have been just as easy for Xena to coerce the two prisoners into providing whatever story she'd dictated. They could have been taken in a separate fight, while Joxer could have fallen down a slope due to his own clumsiness and landed neck first on the axe. This version of the events had even been speculated upon by the Mitoan troops, for the impaled enemy soldier had been a Thessalian infantry regular, not a scout, and he had been dead for several days. And scouts did not carry battleaxes. Like the prisoners, they usually carried the short sword and the dagger.

A darker suspicion, one that Gabrielle alone may have entertained, was that the neck wound from the supposed battleaxe looked very much the same as a wound from the round blade of the chakram. Perhaps it had been a mercy killing, a harsh necessity of removing the weakest link to preserve the chain. She had never asked her soulmate about it. There would have been no point. Joxer had been doomed and wound up being remembered better than anyone could have expected. Had anyone died because of him, his body would have been dumped to feed the feral dogs that followed the army.

The monks' behavior triggered the memory of Joxer. The Gabrielles recognized the same delusional relationship with reality, the same basic harmlessness, and the same doomed simplemindedness. In the middle of what could become a battlefield, they would cling to their mistaken notions of their survival potential. They would die surprised. Though the clones' weren't necessarily wholly correct, the parallels were obvious enough to them. They wondered if their soulmate would feel it necessary to dispatch the monks to safeguard her forces, or if Athena would do so because they would resist her demands for worship. After a few more minutes of walking down the road to the shore another darker thought came to them. Perhaps the victorious Destroyer of Nations would dispatch the monks for the same reason…because they would fail to properly submit to the Conqueror.

_**April 30, 2006 – The Strymon Vale, Macedonia**_

A handpicked squad of ten accompanied the Destroyer of Nations as she moved stealthily through open forest 52 miles northwest of Amphipolis. There were no roads here, only a few game trails, but the eleven clones passed among the tree trunks in total silence. The squad was marching in response to a report from the scouts that a company of the enemy had been sighted coming down the Strymon from the north. These were the first enemy troops to be seen since the battles on the 22nd, and Xena had been eager to meet them face to face. There was a message to send.

If the reports were correct, it would be a good place for an engagement. This was an area where the mountains formed a right angle to the west and north at the head of the Strymon Vale. The bed of the Strymon River had turned north between imposing highlands about 7 miles to the east. And so the squad's quarry had backed themselves into the corner of a box. Their only exit was the bed of a tributary that ascended into the western highlands on its way to Lake Doiran in Macedonia. It would be a hard, steep flight. Xena had taken that route before. If the enemy tried to escape in that direction, she would cut them down as they fled. But Xena had no doubt that today Athena's troops would stand and fight. The scouts had counted and identified them as two-dozen clones of Elainis, the Favorite of the Goddess of War. The Destroyer of Nations wanted them.

Now ice blue eyes scoured the lay of the land. The slightest tingle spoke a warning under her skin. The clone beside her caught her eye. No words. She felt it too. Ahead rose an uphill slope with low outcroppings at its crest. Broken morning sunlight filtered among the leaves, fragmenting the scenery into shifting sprinklings of light and dark. Leaves aflutter in a mild breeze, harsh shadows, the absence of birdcalls…ambush.

A flurry of hand signs sent four clones off to the right, silently slanting uphill out of sight to cover the flank. After another set of signals, Xena with two clones advanced straight ahead while the remaining four slipped out of sight behind tree trunks.

The Destroyer of Nations and her two clones moved in a wary crouch, silently focused, moving to draw the attack. Those waiting above would have seen her deploying her troops and they would move to intercept them. Their leader would be repositioning her forces to surprise those moving to flank her while sending out others to flank those left behind. They would find nothing to challenge and no one to fight.

A sudden hiss cutting the breeze, the telltale compression of air, and Xena's sixth sense reported an object speeding towards her. With an almost negligent motion she snatched the arrow from the air and dropped it at her feet. The clone beside her exhaled softly. It had taken great control on her part to remain in position and not act to protect her _strategos_. She held an arrow of her own between her finger and thumb, as did the third clone on Xena's other side. A second volley came at them with the same result.

Then the enemy attacked, breaking from cover and charging to close the distance, twelve against three. The Xenas drew their swords and chakrams. Running uphill would only serve to move them further from their reinforcements, and so they held their ground and waited. The dozen clones of Elainis of Mycenae were happy to race downhill on their quarry, knowing it conferred a psychological advantage. They didn't draw their swords until the last moment, when they were ten paces away. Four went airborne, leaping high to strike down on the Xenas. Four moved to each side to hem them in. There should have been no way for the three clones of Ares' Favorite to escape, and they didn't try to evade.

Instead, the central Xena leaped to meet her opponents in the air. She split the foursome, passing directly between two pairs and blocking their sword slashes from either side. The cloned Xena on the left flung her chakram at point blank range into the neck of the closest airborne Elainis, where it passed beneath her _kranos_ at an up angle and severed her throat. To recover from the cast, she spun and slashed at the other Elainis, slamming her swordblade against the Mycenaean's to upset her balance. Surprisingly, she didn't pay the least attention to the four enemies threatening her from her left side.

On Xena's right, the Destroyer's clone acted just as unpredictably. Instead of meeting the two leaping enemies in front of her, she faced off against the four on her right flank and closed the distance between them faster than they expected.

The clones of Elainis were strong, quick, and deadly. They had bodies in perfect condition and had a lifetime of battle experience behind them. They were armed with paired longswords, oxided black to kill reflections and disappear at night. In Columbia, just one of them had held her own against the Warrior Princess, the Amazon Bard, and all of their students. Elainis of Mycenae had been the greatest Favorite of Athena, and after leaving behind the life of Iphigenia at Aulis, perhaps the greatest _machairophoros_ of her age. Here, four of her faced a single clone of Xena, armed with a broadsword and chakram, while two more were landing within striking distance to her left.

Suddenly the two landing clones were no longer within striking distance. The clone of Xena had moved to assault the row of four in the blink of an eye. A backswing slashed across the eye slot of the third Elainis' _kranos_, blinding her, while the swing itself hacked off the left hand of their first sister. At the same time, a compound, warbling whoosh cut the air from beyond the engagement on the left and the other two Xena clones vanished. Now the remaining Xena was spinning, passing behind the wounded Elainis clone, her blade extending, but so fast…too fast, and the blade took the right hand of the Elainis standing second in the row. The Xena dipped and snapped her blade back and upward into the throat of the wounded first Elainis, then leapt the next two and beheaded the fourth before she could raise her swords in defense. The clone kept moving, far faster than Xena ever had, move blending into move as her blade sliced too fast to see, the glints of reflection on her sword only a tease in the broken light. For the first time, she performed theinhuman _"Katalepsis"_ in combatShe leapt downhill and half-severed the wounded second Elainis' neck as she tried to raise her remaining left sword in defense. Barely a handful of heartbeats had passed. The Xena clone slowed to watch the last of the four Elainis clones who had initially leapt to attack, die on the sword of an unseen foe.

To her left, four enemy clones lay with their necks severed by chakrams. After another minute, four of Xena's clones decloaked and reappeared downhill behind them, near the bodies of six more enemies. The Destroyer of Nations reappeared in front of her. A sharp whistle from uphill pierced the air, and a few moments later the four clones who had moved to flank the ambush reappeared over the ridge where the enemy had lain hidden. Their blades and chakrams were bloody. With a nod to their general they confirmed that there were no survivors. Xena approached the prisoner.

"Blinded?" The _strategos_ asked.

"Both eyes cut rough ¼ inch deep," Prima replied as she kicked the wounded Elainis' swords from her hands and hauled her to her feet. A trickle of blood ran from beneath her black woven _kranos_.

The Destroyer of Nations grabbed her and ripped away the helm, then snatched her enemy by her long braid and wrenched back her head. In the light streaming down between the trees, she could see the ragged tear across both irises. The backswing had torn away most of her eyelids and the bridge of her nose was laid open between. Prima had turned her blade just enough to rip the lenses from her eyes and spill her ocular humors rather than cause a thin, clean slice.

"Perfect," Xena commented.

"Kill me," the Elainis asked in a hollow voice. Blinded, she had no purpose left in life.

"You are granted no quarter and will do as I command," Xena dictated without a trace of mercy, "you're worthless as a warrior, but your life was spared for a reason. Give your goddess my message. With the Blessing of Ares, the true God of War, I will destroy your army and kill your goddess."

"Never, you peasant bitch," the Elainis spat.

Xena drove her fist into the blinded clone's face. She pulled the straight punch at the moment of impact but it still would have broken a brick. It snapped the Elainis' head back and knocked her unconscious. It did not crack her skull or cause a fatal brain trauma and swelling. Athena's Champion collapsed in the shifting light and shadows under the trees.

"Leave her," the _strategos_ ordered.

Nine clones nodded agreement as Xena's eyes shifted to Prima's with a question.

"She was blinded before she saw my speed against those dying next to her. She saw nothing else _Strategos_," the "special" reported after reanalyzing the action. "No one who did survived."

_**April 30, 2006 – The Actean Peninsula, Chalcidice**_

"Well, I guess that could have gone better," a Gabrielle said as she turned to the identical clones of herself waiting outside the gate of the Holy Monastery of Dochairios.

She'd just stood in front of a fifth monastery on the Actean Peninsula for over an hour and had experienced a variation on the same events they'd met with during each contact over the last week. The first encounter, with the mad monks of Karakalos, had been repeated with so little variation that she'd been able to predict its progression, like a diehard fan at the Rocky Horror Picture Show yelling shout outs and lines of dialog.

After their first experience at the Holy Monastery of Karakalos, the 203 emissaries had returned to their ships and told their tale to the rest of the Gabrielles. All of them had been saddened by the condition of the "inmates" and their prospects for survival. Every single one had recalled their depressing experiences with Joxer. They'd talked about it all, exhaustively, and then, with optimism typical of Gabrielle, had resolved to try again at the next place where they found people living.

The day after leaving the depressing insanity of Karakalos, they'd headed north up the coast to the Holy Monastery of Iviron, certain that they would find cooler heads there. It hadn't worked out that way. If anything, Iviron's brothers had seemed even more threatened and had acted with even greater eccentricity in response. This despite the fact that only one clone had entered the open gate. The apparent head of the monastery had flung water at the Gabrielle who had spoken for the group, shaken his cross at her like a juju, and ranted at her until she and the others finally left. During his performance, his solemn brothers had knelt in prayer, refusing to look at her or answer a word she said.

The Gabrielles had entertained a long discussion after visiting Iviron. Seeing that the response had become more fanatical to the north, the clones had turned south and sailed around the peninsula's southern tip. They'd spent most of a day tacking back and forth to make headway against the winds. The clones bypassed the monastery of Magisti Lavra on Mt. Athos, and headed toward the western side of the Actean Peninsula. By nightfall, the ships were entering the mouth of the Siggitikos Bay, between the peninsulas of Acte and Sithonia, where they turned north again, following the Actean coast.

The first site of habitation the Gabrielles saw on the morning of April 26th was the Holy Monastery of Agios Pavlos. This fortress was composed of a collection of buildings; rising above gray walls up to six stories high, and located on a small plateau about a mile from the coast. Behind the monastery, the land continued upwards for several thousand tree clad feet. Below, it fell in cliffs and steep slopes to the shore. The Gabrielles groaned at the sight of another steep uphill walk to a greeting they could almost predict; wild-eyed, cross-waving, prayer chanting men in long dark robes, sweating in the sun and shaking with fearful condemnation. Never a smile, never a word of welcome, never an invitation to share bread and wine, or talk of their travels or their hopes. Hospitality had gone far downhill in the 2,000 years since their original life.

The 203 boats dropped anchor a few dozen yards offshore and yet another embassy of 203 representatives started out. These were different clones, and in fact, each embassy had been made up of Gabrielles who hadn't gone ashore before. Although those who waited in the boats were in no hurry to experience the madness and rejection the earlier groups of visitors had described, they were all willing to share the emotional and physical burden. Unspoken was the fact that they were also willing to share any possibility of danger that awaited them from the hostiles ashore. As it was, they went unarmed into a land of known madness, anticipating an unfriendly reception, though for what offense, they still had no idea. At this point, they mostly chalked it up to xenophobia, isolationism, and delusions of persecution, abetted by compulsive paranoia and twisted devotionalism. In other words, the monks were cuckoo, though only a shade more so than some of the most isolated and provincial of the ancient Hellenes. Practically the only positive note was the absence of real violence so far.

The 203 Gabrielles made their way across a narrow rocky beach and onto the climbing road. It was mid-morning and the lands should have been populated by herdsmen and farmers, traders and townsfolk, all going about the business of living. Instead, the fields, the road, and the buildings all appeared deserted just as they had at Karakalos and Iviron. To the Gabrielles, originally from a farming community and more recently from American cities, it was unnatural and unnerving. They stared around as they walked, constantly alert, wary and on guard, their tension accumulating from their first moment ashore.

After a third of an hour, the group marched past a group of outbuildings and stood before the gates of the Holy Monastery of Agios Pavlos, though they had no idea of its name. Once again they were confronted by an open gate set in a strong, high wall surrounding an empty courtyard. _Well, here we go again,_ they all thought, recalling the descriptions their sisters had reported from Karakalos and Iviron. This time, the whole group entered, since sending in one or all seemed to have made no difference in their reception and there was safety in numbers.

The 203 Gabrielles stood looking around the courtyard, just waiting for the frenzied rejection of the monks. The monks didn't disappoint. Thirty-five robed brothers practically tumbled out of the doors of the Katholicon. They stopped dead in their tracks and confronted the Gabrielles in shock.

"_Gynaikes!" _Several monks gasped in surprise.

"_Daemons!" _Several others exclaimed in horror.

"Of all the stupid…" a Gabrielle groaned.

They all knew _daemons_ as the invisible life companions that each mortal was assigned at birth by the gods, a guide of sorts…a conscience or inner voice. They were only dimly aware, (mostly from watching horror movies such as "The Exorcist"), that the word had come to mean evil monstrosities or minions of the Devil. This was a Christian corruption of the Greek word that had occurred after her time, to put a name to a Christian concept. Even the Devil himself wasn't really familiar; he was just a later personification of evil, a force they'd known well. In fact, the Gabrielles knew him mostly from two Halloweens in Columbia.

This time the Gabrielles didn't even get a chance to speak before the praying, crossing gestures, and crucifix waving began. The clones had noted that for a moment, at least a few of the inmates had recognized them as women, before joining the rest in ascribing them supernatural origins and the status of invisibility.

_Well that explains some things_, the Gabrielles thought, _no wonder they act like they don't see or hear us._ _Their denial and delusions are just too strong, too deeply ingrained. Even when they see us for an instant, the madness claims them in seconds and it won't let them go. How sad._

After watching the display for a few minutes, the 203 clones departed. Though they hadn't had any success in making contact, they'd learned something that their sisters hadn't found out before. Bit by bit, they were unraveling the mechanisms of the monks' madness…their delusional architecture. It probably wouldn't help in any practical way, but Gabrielle had always been interested in people, and this was interesting. On their way back to the boats, the clones polished their observations and conjectures in their heads like gradually smoothing gemstones in a lapidary tumbler. Later they would talk about their observations together, and finally they would write them down.

Their experience had been repeated, with slight variations, as another group of clones had visited the Holy Monastery of Xiropotamos on April 27th. The monastery itself stood atop a terraced plateau, like Agios Pavlos, a mile inland from the shore. The embassy of clones resigned themselves to an hour of uphill walking under a bright early-afternoon sky. As their sisters had described, the land was eerily lacking in the sounds of humanity. The entire way, they could see the walls and buildings looming above them, silent, and devoid of visible activity.

Upon their arrival at the gate, they found the entire occupancy turned out to meet them. Thirty stern, bearded monks in black robes, identical to all the others stood in a row blocking the gateway. Before them stood their Superior, with a longer beard, a more elaborate crucifix clutched in his fist, and a sterner look on his face. It was the first time the clones had faced anyone other than the rank and file brothers.

The chanting and prayers began before the Gabrielles had even drawn up in a group to face them. There were more accusations about being _daemons,_ cryptic references to the Devil, and repeated commands to depart This time, several of the nearest clones were splashed with water. They sputtered in annoyance, tossed up their hands in exasperation at being otherwise ignored, and dispensed the same warning about the coming war to deaf ears. Finally they left.

"Did it seem like the leader was as crazy as the others?" A Gabrielle asked her sisters.

"It would explain some things," another answered.

"You mean that was the caretaker and he's as crazy as the inmates?"

"Sure seemed that way to me," the first Gabrielle replied.

"Wish they'd quit throwing the water," another chaffed as she recalled being splashed in the face, " it's so juvenile."

"I think it's a ritual, not just bad manners," one reasoned.

"Weird," another remarked. "I don't think I'll ever understand the insane."

The armada had stayed put the rest of that day, wondering what to do. Finally, they decided to continue with their plan, heading north to the base of the Actean Peninsula. There they could debark and make their way to Amphipolis overland through Chalcidice. The land would be familiar and they could approach the Strymon Vale obliquely, from the west. Not a single one of the clones would miss the boats.

They spent the 28th in transit north, and when they spied another fortress, they stopped to discuss the value of bothering to stop. By the time they'd finished, the day had passed from noon to evening and they anchored their flotilla off shore near the Holy Monastery of Dochairios.

The Monastery of Dochairios was a collection of stone buildings practically right on the shore. In this respect, it was much like the monastery of Iviron. It was also a more sprawling construction than the monasteries of Karakalos, Agios Pavlos, or Xiropotamos. Dochairios gave the impression of having overgrown its original foundations through additions over countless years, and this was, in fact, the case. The building had started in the 10th century and hadn't been completed until the 17th. Renovations had been done in modern times, adding to the impression of rambling.

Morning came and the Gabrielles awoke. For the first time, none of them volunteered to go ashore. In the end, they had to draw straws aboard each boat to choose their embassy of 203. These clones reluctantly went ashore and crossed the narrow beach to a gate. This was set in a building among many in a lower area, while the mass of the monastery loomed above on a higher portion of land. Foundations and walls isolated the inner spaces from the outside world, creating a closed enclave just as at the other monasteries. All had been constructed of the same gray native stone. All were basic blocky structures, regularly pierced with windows. As always, no sign of human life presented itself outside the monastery.

For once the gate was closed, but a bell hung on a wrought iron arm attached to the wall beside the hinges. A clone had rung it upon their arrival and continued to ring it every few minutes when it got no response. The Gabrielles stood waiting at the gate in growing irritation. As a half-hour passed, they continued to wait, periodically ringing the bell. In a final fit of frustration, when nearly an hour had passed, a Gabrielle took hold of the short rope attached to the bell's clapper and began whipping it back and forth producing a constant din of clangs. She did this with gritted teeth and steam rising from her brow. The other clones shook their heads, fighting back grins, hard pressed not to laugh.

At last the cacophony provoked results. A window high overhead popped open. A single monk thrust his head out. He screamed something that none of the Gabrielles could understand and dumped a whole basin of water on the clone ringing the bell. Then he thrust out a crucifix, shouted something else at the top of his lungs, and slammed the window closed. And that was all the reaction the Gabrielles got at the Holy Monastery of Dochairios.

The soaked, bell-ringing Gabrielle screamed in a frustrated rage, spun on her heel, and kicked the bell hard enough to snap off the arm that held it to the wall. It gave a final clang as it bounced off the gate.

_(Readers may wonder why the water upset the Gabrielles to such an extent. For them, it was all too reminiscent of the way townsfolk would empty their chamber pots out upper story windows and into the streets with no consideration of the consequences. Passersby beware. This foul habit was common everywhere that plumbing didn't exist…in other words, almost everywhere except in certain parts of Rome. It was also common practice for defenders during a siege. The behavior persisted into the 19th century, and the act was adapted to become one of protest and degradation even long after toilets became commonplace. This explains why Xena had been so amused at soaking trick-or-treaters in Columbia on Halloween. One can almost see the youthful delinquent she might have been, marshalling other miscreants at some upper window, as they awaited the passage of their current object of torment, while clutching chamber pots filled with excrement. The monks, of course, were just using Holy Water as a ritual cleanser.) Editor_

"Lunatics!" She yelled towards the closed window above at the top of her lungs. Then she stomped off down the road towards the boats, not looking to see if the others were following or not.

"Well, I guess that could have gone better," a Gabrielle said as she turned to the identical clones of herself waiting outside the gate of the Holy Monastery of Dochairios. The others nodded in agreement.

"I don't guess there's any point in staying after that, huh?" another remarked. She shrugged and turned to follow the pissed off clone back to the shore.

For a few moments the rest of the Gabrielles stood outside the gate. The only differences between it now and when they'd arrived was the large puddle soaking into the cobbled road and the broken bell. They looked at the monastery and then down the road. There was no reason to believe that anything positive would come from waiting longer. Obviously this asylum was closed because it held the most deranged and perhaps potentially violent lunatics on the peninsula. It was the only conclusion that made sense. Finally in twos and threes at first, they began walking back to their boats.

"That's it!" The soaked and aggravated clone declaimed upon her return. "There is no possible reason for us to stop at another one of these mad houses. Let's just get on with our plan, shall we?" The clones on her boat looked askance at their sister's rage.

Similar, if less vehement statements were voiced aboard the other 202 boats. No one could really find a good reason to stop at another mad house anyway. The results of their efforts had been consistent, if not progressively worse. It didn't take the Gabrielles long to agree to proceed after lunch.

By the morning of April 30th, the flotilla had reached the narrow channel between the Actean Peninsula and Ouliani Island. After some discussion, the Gabrielles decided to anchor their craft near the town of Trypiti. Several miles before reaching the settlement, they'd spied a road running parallel to their course and almost a furlong inland from the shore. At Trypiti, the road seemed to turn north, inland, and the clones decided that they would be best served by following the road.

Geography and logic suggested that it would lead to the city of Acanthus and thence along Chalcidice's eastern coast. If, in fact, this modern road followed the route of the ancient road they had known, it would wind its way along the shore and then turn inland at Stargirus. These were lands that the Gabrielles knew well, and they were confident that once they'd left Acte, they'd have no trouble making their way to the Strymon Vale.

To say that the inhabitants of Trypiti, (population 862), were surprised when 203 sundry Egyptian sailboats appeared at their docks would be a gross understatement. To claim that they were flabbergasted when the voyagers, 8,000 identical blonde women, came ashore would be an understatement far beyond gross. A statistically significant portion of the citizens passed out cold in the streets overlooking the dock. The remainder was rendered speechless. They stared at the Gabrielles. The Gabrielles stared back.

"A whole town full of retards," one muttered in English. "First we find fortresses full of madmen, and now an entire town of imbeciles…what are the chances of that?"

"It can't be coincidence," a second reasoned. "Maybe all of Greece has gone downhill."

After considering the situation in silence, another clone ventured an opinion.

"Maybe this is all evidence of the war. Maybe it's not just starting, and it's been going on for a while. Maybe someone's found a weapon that spreads madness and we've been seeing the civilian casualties."

A whole crowd of Gabrielles who had overheard the remark stopped in their tracks and stared at the speaker. Their minds were furiously whirling, weighing the possibility of such a weapon. It was insidious, horrifying, and felt all too similar to the attacks of September 11, 2001, which had happened only half a year ago to them. Could Athena's forces have done this? Had science provided some germ or chemical that could steal peoples' wits? Or worse, could this be the work of the Destroyer of Nations? The Hellene's Bane, blinded by rage and lust for vengeance, encouraged by Ares, and bereft of her soulmate's love…she would know no limits. Trapped in the depths of her _katalepsis_, _kori Polemos_ would find any means to her desired end acceptable. The Gabrielles shivered with foreboding and horror. Had the duration of her absence allowed such savagery to take hold of her beloved warrior? Could Xena have done this?

The group, who with almost one mind had simultaneously followed this train of thought, stood stricken in the road. Around them the remaining clones gathered, wondering what had petrified their sisters practically in mid-stride. Their inquiries were half-answered with partially coherent suppositions and trembling hands making uncertain gestures. Bit by bit, the possibility was revealed and it struck the remaining clones to varying degrees, though all could imagine the scenario. For the first time, quiet dissention developed. Some of the Gabrielles didn't accept the hypothesis that linked the condition of the villagers and the monks. Others didn't believe that what they were seeing was the result of a weapon. Yet a greater number didn't accept that this was a result of war. And a final segment wouldn't believe that Xena was responsible. Finally, one clone, perhaps having acquired more irritability or perhaps more pragmatic, stood on a fence of fieldstones, raised her voice, and addressed the indecisive mob.

"Listen all of you, this isn't doing us any good, scaring yourselves with possibilities. You can't prove this one way or another standing around in this village of mutes. Can't we please just get on with our plan? We've still got a long way to go and we won't answer anything if we don't start. Now there's the road," she said, gesturing to the dirt track leading north out of Trypiti, "so let's get moving shall we?"

Though it would be impossible to tell visually, it was almost certain that this was the same incensed clone who had been drenched with water at the monastery of Dochairios. She stared down from her fence-top pulpit and her sisters stared back up at her. One by one, and then in increasingly larger groups, the Gabrielles began to turn towards the road. Eventually, the whole milling throng headed north.

_**May 4, 2006 – The Strymon Vale, Macedonia**_

Despite the Destroyer's reiterated challenge, no evidence of Athena, her clones, or her army had materialized within the patrol range of the _kataskopoi._ Xena had never been the most patient of generals when waiting wasn't a part of her plan. Now, waiting for a battle that she'd already seen in a vision was beginning to chaff at her patience.

Almost as irritating as the lack of her enemy's presence was the virtual disappearance of the 8,000 Gabrielles. It gnawed at her that an army the size of her own could have eluded her so easily and vanished. Yet at the rate their boats had been traveling, only 4 knots, they couldn't have gone far. Xena could have ordered the Miss Artiphys or the Argo to hunt for them, but to what end? She had no intention of approaching them or allowing her clones to disrupt their focus before the battle by doing so. Still, the mystery of the mob of cloned Gabrielles caused her to wonder endlessly. She spent a lot of her wondering time sitting alone in her tent. There, by herself, her mind sooner or later gravitated back to her primary concern…the Goddess of Wisdom.

If I were Athena, where would I gather my forces, she asked herself for the thousandth time. It must be a place close enough to allow deployment but distant enough to avoid discovery. In the past, her ground troops marched from the north, east, and west. Her ships came from the south. Where did they come from? It must be a place with resources and space for the encampment of over 56,000. It must have access to a port. Hostile approach must be limited, with routes of invasion few and easily secured. Where is Athena hiding her army?

Xena stared at the maps spread out over her table. She had long ago committed them to memory, having spent dozens of hours during the last weeks challenging them to yield up some insight. She closed her eyes and let out a deep breath. She could see Hellas, the lands surrounding ancient Thrace and the topography in the vicinity of Amphipolis, clearly in her mind's eye. Where was the Goddess of Wisdom? Where?

As she had before, she let her eyes slide across the maps from east to west. Mile by mile, she examined and rejected the lands from the Bosporus along the northern coast of the Sea of Marmara to mouth of the Ergene River, (all too distant). Her glance moved along the coast of Thrace, (too narrow, being backed by highlands, and all of it vulnerable by sea), almost more of a trap for a large army. West of the mouths of the Nestos River, her scouts had reported nothing, all the way along the coast to the outlet of Lake Bolbe in Chalcidice. The interior of Chalcidice had been laid waste by Secunda's actions on the 22nd. But on that day, Athena's troops had marched from Therme, modern-day Thessaloniki.

West of Therme lay the Thermaic Gulf, the Thermaikos Kolpos. To the northwest lay the basin of what she had known as eastern Macedonia, which was the watershed of the Axios, (or Vardar), River. This was gently sloping land, shielded to the north by a crescent of mountains whose eastern highlands separated it from the Strymon Vale. It lay thirty-five miles across, with sheltered anchorage at the head of the Thermaic Gulf.

Xena had considered this space carefully before. It's closest precincts, and the city of Therme, were less than 50 miles from her army in Amphipolis. Her mounted scouts had kept the area under surveillance and had reported nothing. Still, there was a lot of territory that the_ kataskopoi_ couldn't watch from their vantage points in the eastern highlands. It was a desirable area, and it was an area with plenty of martial history.

Long before her time, those lands had been a battlefield of kings and conquerors. It had been an invasion route for the Spartans and for the Persians before them. The very soil was consecrated with blood, and Xena had always thought of it as sacred to Ares. In ancient times its one major city, Pella, had hosted a great temple to the God of War. This temple was an outgrowth of the earlier worship that had been centered among the warlike people of Thrace, and had been jointly dedicated to both Ares and his own mentor, Enyo, the elder, (and later, largely forgotten), Goddess of War. As such, the God of War's Favorite hadn't thought the area receptive or favorable to his bitter rival, Athena. And yet, strategically, it was highly favorable. Xena was neither positively convinced, nor willing to discount the area as Athena's base. Previously she had passed it by and continued to search for a more amenable location. Today, having still not found a better possibility, she was willing to make a test. She sat mentally reviewing the remaining available weapons gleaned from the aircraft carrier's arsenal.

_(For centuries the Achaean Greeks regarded the Thracians as barbarians, not really proper Greeks at all, for they were war-mongering, brutal, and cared little for the learned and philosophical pursuits of Athens or Corinth. In those earlier days, the Thracians had been assigned a close relationship with the Scythians, with whom they often fought. From Thrace, the fearful worship of the war god, Ares, had been acquired, for Greek fought Greek century after century and the brutality of war was terrifying. It deserved no less than a terrifying and bloodthirsty god. Soon, Ares was enlisted into the pantheon as a comrade in arms of the older war goddess Enyo. Later still, Enyo was superceded by Ares and Athena, who personified the duality of battle, heated passion vs. cold calculation. Ironically, the Romans, more organized in their warmongering than the Greeks, worshipped both Ares and Enyo, as Mars and Bellona.) Editor _

The noon meeting came and the tent filled with the officers and reporting scouts. As before, there had been no sightings of the enemy. The commanders reminded their general that after almost a month of deployment, the tons of rations from the USS Harry Truman were running low. They would have to be replenished if the campaign continued. In the modern world, there was no possibility of feeding an army on local game. For once, Xena was thankful that her forces numbered only 8,000, similar in size to a campaigning Roman legion with its attached auxiliaries and mercenaries.

"Very well," the Destroyer of Nations said to a _chiliarchos_, "I want a detachment of thirty to take the Miss Artiphys, with another hundred to shadow her in the Argo. Make a round trip from Kavala, stopping at Avdira, Maroneia, Alexandroupoli, and Enez. Gather any available stores and rations. Limit perishables. Pay for 'em or take 'em by force if necessary. Return in three days."

The commander of a thousand left to make the arrangements. Xena addressed the remaining officers, outlining a course of provocation for when the vessels returned. She intended to stir up the hornet's nest if it truly lay in Macedonia.

"I want two detachments of scouts in the west to extend their range an' enter the Axius plain. They're to move by night and remain hidden during the day. They are to search for evidence of the enemy an' return in three days with whatever information they've collected."

The _hecatontarches _in charge of the western _kataskopoi_ nodded assent and left the tent.

"Next, I want special munitions prepared. Take six of the remaining plague canisters an' attach 'em to M720 shells from the M224 60mm mortar. Remove the HE charges. We'll let the impact energy breach the canister seals. They're pressurized for timed dispersal so they oughta spew out a nice cloud of germs all at once when they hit."

The _hecatontarches_ in charge of the ordinance detail nodded and left to carry out the Destroyer's orders.

Three days later when the officers met there was plenty of news. The _praipositos,_ or commander, of the supply procurement mission detailed the actions she'd been forced to take. At Avdira they had purchased almost eight tons of canned goods and dry packaged foods. All this had been easily loaded into the Argo's hold with plenty of room to spare. At Maroneia, the clones had been refused, but they'd seen a ship unloading steel shipping containers of supplies at the dock. The commander had ordered the Miss Artiphys to stand guard with her Phalanx while troops from the sub had forcibly loaded the contents of three containers into the Argo. The clones in the hydrofoil had been forced to open fire only once, against the town's police force, which had arrived on the scene early in the action. The MK 15 had fired a burst of 300 rounds into a patrol car and then strafed the street bordering the dock in a demonstration of force. Afterwards, no one had interrupted the clones. Three crews of twenty had efficiently unloaded the containers.

At Alexandroupoli, the third stop, the clones had purchased six tons of food, mostly dry packaged, canned, and pickled. The _praipositos_ had wondered about bringing back 400 lbs. of cake mixes, 300 lbs. of olives, and 600 lbs. of snack foods, but the 2,200 lbs. of canned meats was welcome. Spam would be a staple for a couple weeks. It would go with the 1,000 lbs. of pasta. The two tons of canned vegetables and 300 lbs. of sport drink mixes were also welcome.

Finally, the vessels had stopped at Enez. The town was ancient, like Avdira, (Abdera), and Maroneia, (Maronea), but it hadn't fared as well. Enez, (Aenus), was a tiny village now whose main purpose was to support the archeologists excavating the historic town. There the clones had found a single grocery store selling food. They'd bought everything and paid the owner enough that he'd happily planned to close for a week. The man had been so smashed on Ouzo that he hadn't even noticed that the four clones who had come in were identical or that the others who followed them weren't the same four.

The ships had returned to the Strymon with a total of 28 tons of supplies. It amounted to 56,000 lbs., or 7 lbs. of victuals per soldier. They weren't the balanced meals from a warship's galley. Instead, they were civilian foods that could be stretched to keep the army fed for a week. The _strategos_ was only mildly disappointed. There were other towns and they all had food.

The Destroyer of Nations was much more interested in the reports of the _kataskopoi_ who had searched the area around the Vardar River. Two scouts were present, these being the commanders of each of two detachments. The first had moved in a northward curve beginning near the town of Kilkis. They had crossed the plain to the river within three miles of the site of ancient Pella, and then returned. The second detachment had traveled further south, staying within three to four miles of the coast.

"At first we saw old evidence of troop movements, _Strategos_," the leader of the southern detachment reported, "encampments abandoned, waste pits, rings from cook fires, and trampled stream banks. This was five miles northwest of Therme just east of the town of Sindos. As we moved further west, between highways 1 and 2, we tracked the army's movement back toward its source. We crossed a river where the banks had collapsed from the passage of so much infantry, and then moved out onto the plain. The tracks veered north as they approached the Axios River west of Athanassios, and then abruptly followed its eastern bank north." The scout paused for a moment and then added, "The land was empty. We saw no civilians, no soldiers, and almost no wildlife. It appeared to be a deserted land. Homesteads and vehicles had been abandoned, fields and livestock pens denuded. We turned back and completed our mission after 70 hours."

The Destroyer of Nations understood that this was the movement of the army Secunda had destroyed on April 22nd. Her scouts had picked up their trail before they'd made their final camp at Therme…before marching to their deaths in Chalcidice. So, they had come down the Axios from some point to the north. Xena turned expectant eyes on the leader of the scouts who had spied out the lands to the north. The scout gave her report.

"_Strategos_, we moved from the highlands into the plain after skirting the town of Kilkis. It seemed to be deserted, however we maintained our distance outbound. Within three miles of the highlands, we first saw the lights of an encampment in the distance. We approached with stealth, and before crossing highway E75 we cloaked ourselves. The camp was near Aspros. We moved to within 100 yards of a massive bivouac with a palisade and ditch. There we observed clones of Achilles, Elainis, Callisto, and Mavican. We estimated their compliment at no less than 20,000, but we also saw groups of mounted clones leaving, destined for places to the north and west. We saw no mechanized vehicles, though they had pickets and horses for perhaps 1,500 cavalry. They are drawing water from the Axios and appeared to be well provisioned. The camp appeared to have been occupied for some time. On our return trip we took a different route, heading more southerly. From a distance we observed the remains of another camp, of comparable size, that had been abandoned. This was near Mavicnori. Tracks led south from its gate _en mass_, but they were old. We did not approach. When we returned to the highlands, we spied out Kilkis. _Strategos_, all the inhabitants had been slaughtered some time ago. We completed our mission and returned after 73 hours."

The Goddess of Wisdom had bred two complete armies! Unlike me, she had matured a full compliment of clones, but like me, her enemy had destroyed one army. Xena thought briefly of her primary cloning site in Mongolia, nuked by Athena's clones in January of 2005. Now we're even, she thought, our forces halved by the power of the atom before the final conflict.

Despite the numbers her scouts had observed, Xena expected 24,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry to oppose her in the battle she'd seen in Ares' vision. They were there in Macedonia, mostly in one large camp. Now the Destroyer of Nations knew her enemy's position, just as she assumed Athena knew hers. Bit by bit I am whittling down your advantages, Goddess of War, she thought, and on a level field you cannot beat me. Your only chance would be to challenge me one on one, and you won't do that because in the moment you utter that challenge, it will be answered by my god. No, you will wage war using your clones to fight my clones, and I will destroy you. But in the hour of your army's defeat, your pride will not allow you to resist confronting me, and in doing so, you will seal your doom. I am ready for you. Now I will drive your forces to battle, and my first move will be to degrade your troops.

"A 60mm mortar company supported by a dozen under the command of Secunda will move into position in the Axios Plain," Xena ordered. "They will bombard the enemy's encampment with six plague shells and them withdraw. Avoid any engagements if possible. Each of you will carry an M-67 grenade. Capture is not an option."

Under no circumstances would the Destroyer of Nations allow the secrets of her uniforms to fall into enemy hands. The mission was necessary. The personnel as always, were expendable. The company would need to close to about 2 miles, no closer, to get within the M224 mortar's range. They should have no trouble lobbing the six canisters of influenza, small pox, and Ebola into Athena's camp from a safe distance, and they could do it quickly. Firing rates of up to 30 rounds per minute were attainable with the M224. Being cloaked, they should have no problem slipping away undetected afterwards. Yet every foreseeable contingency had to be addressed beforehand. The 6.5 oz. charge of Composition B explosive in an M-67 fragmentation grenade would destroy a body when held against the chest. In war, there is no substitute for being prepared.

Secunda nodded to acknowledge the order and made only one suggestion.

"_Strategos,_ we could also take two high explosive rounds for diversionary purposes if necessary."

Xena nodded to approve the suggestion. "Leave with your company at 0600 hours. It should give you time to begin your retreat before dawn the second day."

The mission objective was about 65 miles away. Xena was expecting the clones to cover that distance, on foot and undetected, in 22 hours with the actual strike at about 0400 hours. They could cross about 35 miles of Chalcidice's interior in 12 hours, reaching the plain in the early evening. The scouts had reported the area deserted, and Secunda's company wouldn't arrive in dangerous enemy territory until after dark. Unmentioned was the fact that the mission's timetable allowed no time for rest.

_**May 4, 2006 – Eastern Chalcidice**_

"Oh, would you look at that!" A Gabrielle exclaimed in disgust to no one in particular, though there were only more of herselves around to hear.

"Someone's destroyed the bridge," a second stated needlessly as the whole group of 50 clones stared into the defile.

It was about 80 feet almost straight down to a streambed, and at the bottom, rushing water boiled over boulders, shattered concrete, and fallen struts. They were standing at the new end of highway E90, where it ran along the eastern coast of Chalcidice just north of Nea Vrasna. It was the very same bridge that the Destroyer's forces had broken with a barrage of Sea Sparrow missiles while on their way to Kavala.

The 50 Gabrielle clones who stood looking down at the wreckage comprised an advance party that had been trekking ahead of the rest by about three hours. They weren't really acting as scouts in a strict sense, but now they had the dubious honor of informing their sisters that the road ended in a deep gully. The rest of the Gabrielles were back where highway E90 joined highway 16, which they'd taken all the way from the town of Trypiti. The first clone shook her head in disappointment and sat down on the roadside to rest. One by one the others gathered around and sat nearby.

In the four days since they'd abandoned the boats, the Gabrielles had only walked about 55 miles north. Part of that was due to most of a day spent in the city of Stratoni. The first 200 clones had trudged into town and caused a panic. The city was still reacting to the hydrogen bomb that had gone off just 30 miles away, in the interior of Halkidiki, as the moderns called Chalcidice. In fact, over half the population had fled, leaving only the most stubborn behind. These saw 200 identical women in military fatigues and assumed that they were an invading army, perhaps coming to plant another bomb. This fiction was reinforced as more and more Gabrielles caught up and entered the city.

Soon the blondes were everywhere, sitting in the park, lounging near the docks, standing in groups along the roadsides, and looking everywhere for food. By the time all 8,000 clones had entered Stratoni, they outnumbered the natives, and though they weren't armed, the citizens thought the worst. They weren't friendly or welcoming. Nobody greeted them. Where the people of Trypiti had simply stared in silence and the people of Ierissos just down the road had fled and left their town deserted, the people of Stratoni simply slipped away in groups or by families. After their receptions in Acte, Trypiti, and Ierissos, the Gabrielles were running short of patience, but mostly, they were hungry.

With half the population gone and more leaving by the hour, the Gabrielles filled in for them, occupying their houses and raiding their refrigerators and pantries. At several restaurants, scores of blondes would seat themselves, only to find that the employees had run out the back. They took over the grilles, kitchens, and bars, serving themselves and packing meals for the road. Unlike the people of East Africa, who had hidden their livestock and then greeted the clones, the people of Stratoni fled and left their food behind. Instead of helping where they could as they had done in Tanzania, Burundi, and Uganda, the Gabrielles simply ate everything they saw. Eventually, they invaded empty grocery stores and markets. When they finally left, a detail of five hundred pushed loaded shopping carts down the highway.

Now it was these same shopping carts that were the problem. The next morning they had reached the broken bridge. The Gabrielles could have scaled the defile and climbed up the other side to continue down the highway. Though it would have been dangerous and time consuming, they could even have accomplished it free climbing without gear. But getting their provisions and the carts they needed to transport them across the stream would be almost impossible. They didn't even have any rope to lower and raise the carts to and from the stream at the bottom. Crossing the actual streambed, with all its boulders and ruined concrete bridge supports, was inconceivable. They would have to find another route north to Amphipolis.

_(Of course all the gas stations had long ago closed and been boarded up when "the gas had turned to water", as the fisherman on the Nile had reported weeks before. In fact, they were the first businesses in Greece to fail from the war. As a result of this, the Gabrielles hadn't found a single road map yet. They were navigating using a combination of dead reckoning, memories of the land from their original life, and road signs. Again, unlike the Xenas, they were not an army.) Editor_

"We may as well go back and tell the others," a Gabrielle suggested as she stood. The other 49 clones looked up at her from their seats. "We'll have to sooner or later."

With a groan another got to her feet, then another, and finally the rest.

"What the hell, may as well," one remarked, after taking a last wistful look down into the wreckage of the bridge. "I wonder where we'll go?"

"Well, with the carts we've got to stick to the roads, and I guess that means turning inland," one answered.

"That means following the highway," another said, "at least at first."

"It goes west and we need to go north," a disgruntled clone pointed out.

"All we'll be doing is detouring because of food we'll have to eat during our detour," a Gabrielle reasoned. "We may as well eat what we can't carry and go cross country."

The others walking nearby stopped and looked at her. She looked back and shrugged.

"It's not as if that food's going to last forever," she said.

"I think we'll probably find a road heading north before too long," the clone who had suggested returning to the highway said. "I can't imagine that highway goes all the way to Theme without a turnoff somewhere," she reasoned. "There were some settlements around the lakes. Maybe they've grown into cities."

The clones recalled the sparse homesteads and herders' camps of 2,000 years before.

"That's right," another agreed, brightening, "and if they're like Stratoni and Ierissos, we can get more food so long as we find the towns. Our chances should be better on the roads than off." Several more clones nodded in agreement.

They continued to discuss the pros and cons as they walked, building a consensus. By the time they'd reached the junction of highways E90 and 16 where the rest of the clones were waiting, they had made up their mind. The Gabrielles would go west on E90 and look for the first road heading north. They would push their shopping carts and look forward to doing more shopping in the towns they entered. It was a good plan, and they embarked on it right after eating lunch.

Within less than two hours they found both a town and a road leading north. What remained of Rendina lay at the eastern end of Lake Volvi, which the Gabrielles knew as Lake Bolbe. It was deserted. The town lay barely 15 miles from Secunda's ground zero. Most of what little still stood had been partially scorched by the blast and heat waves during the first minutes after detonation. The few lucky survivors had immediately fled before the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

The Gabrielles looked around in saddened amazement. There was little to be salvaged, but they did add some canned goods from a small market. More than anything they'd seen so far, the condition of Rendina convinced them that they were headed into a war zone. For some time they stood in silence, taking it all in. Then they turned to the north and started walking again, passing a slightly burnt sign that could still be read.

Nigrita 37 km Seres 62 km

"How many miles in a kilometer?" One clone asked rhetorically. If she didn't know then no one there did. Sure enough, no one answered. "Nevermind," she muttered.

In fact, Seres was about 37 miles north by the road, and about 26 miles as the crow flies. It was perhaps 20 miles northwest of Amphipolis. It had never existed in Gabrielle's original lifetime and she didn't know it from Timbuktu. Still, the clones could reach it in two days, barring unforeseen delays, and they would happily find that it was adjacent to the Strymon River.

_**May 5, 2006 – Amphipolis to Macedonia**_

Eos was just a rumor when Secunda led 16 clones west from the Strymon Vale into Chalcidice. They took the same road she had taken on April 21st. They were already climbing the highlands above the Strymon when Helios cleared the horizon.

The strike team took turns carrying the M224 mortar and its ammunition. The weapon weighed about 44 lbs. The eight shells weighed almost 32 lbs. The load divided easily, with the mortar tube, its bipod, and baseplate each weighing between 14 and 15 lbs. Another four clones carried two shells each. An eighth clone carried the gunsight. The eight loads were traded off between the 16 clones every half-hour.

By 1300 hours, the clones passed Sohos, 22 miles out from Amphipolis. A gentle breeze carried the rank stench of decay from the town. They avoided it, marching past and maintaining a 200-yard margin, knowing all the inhabitants were dead, for Secunda had ordered their executions herself. Later they passed the crossroads where the battle to turn Athena's army had been fought. There the grassland was scorched and the scent of rotting bodies mingled with that of smoke.

The clones looked to the south and saw a blasted land. The burning continued from where they stood to the far distant range of their vision. There, at the edges of their sight, a raw crater opened between the now joined lakes. After a short rest, they continued west along the road.

During the afternoon, the detail passed the deserted towns of Pende and Langadas, where people had fled the blast. At Langadas they left the road and moved cross-country, heading northwest. They crossed highways E79 and 65, about five miles southeast of Kilkis. By then it was 2015 hours, and Secunda called a brief halt. The clones rested and heated rations over cans of Sterno, drank water and consulted their maps. They discerned that they had another 22 miles, or almost 7½ hours' march left. At 2055 hours they resumed their mission. So far, they were still in lands under the surveillance of the _strategos'_ scouts, and so they hadn't bothered to cloak themselves.

Secunda ordered the clones to disappear at 2130 hours as they descended from the highlands of western Chalcidice to the Axios Plain of Macedonia. The "special" figured that her company would be within mortar range in about 17 miles. As the _kataskopoi_ had reported, within three miles of leaving the highlands, the clones saw the first traces of light from the enemy camp. Now they moved forward more carefully.

At 0230 hours the clones crossed highway E75. The town of Aspros lay another mile and a half west, and a half-mile past it lay the Axios River. Secunda left her company hidden in a ravine at 0310 hours and went on alone to scout Athena's camp. Again, she trusted to her speed, breaking into a flat-out run as soon as she left her sisters behind. Within two minutes she'd passed Aspros and she saw the encampment ahead beside the river. As she drew closer, she also saw a line of six enemy clones. They were a patrol, deployed to secure the perimeter at a distance of a quarter-mile from the palisade. An evil grin crossed her face and she put on a burst of speed, breaking into a sprint.

The "special" covered the hundred yards to the enemy line in under four seconds. She swept out her sword and simply held it at arms' length to her side as she ran past the patrol. They never even realized that she was there, invisible and moving almost silently at 50 mph. The blade cleanly decapitated all six. Secunda never stopped. She slowed slightly to sheath her sword and turned back toward her troops. Still at her running pace, she completed the circuit of three miles in slightly less than five minutes. When she rejoined the other clones, she gave them the target coordinates.

"The target bearing is 265º, range is 3,485 yards."

The four clones in the mortar company set up the weapon, a 40" long tube supported on a round baseplate and a pair of telescoping legs. They calculated the incline for the bipod, checked the bearing with the sight, and then lined up their shells.

Secunda caught the company leader's eyes and gave her a nod. The clone hefted the first shell and placed it at the mortar's muzzle. Before releasing it, she checked the other clones to make sure they were aware that she was about to launch. They had all lowered their heads. She dropped the shell.

A heartbeat later there was a loud thump and then a whoosh as the shell leapt out of the mortar and into the sky in a shower of sparks. Her second handed her the next shell. She fired the six plague shells in a rapid succession of precise rhythmic motions. They shrieked towards their target, one after another, only seconds apart. When the last had gone, the clones could still hear the previous two falling in the distance, making the characteristic whistling sound of an incoming finned projectile. There was no report.

"Fire one M720 to confirm the targeting," Secunda ordered.

The leader of the mortar battery nodded and dropped a final shell into the tube. Everyone ducked. The shell screamed away into the night. For a handful of seconds, the clones waited. Secunda stared at the target area through a pair of field glasses. The shell finally landed and the detonation of the high explosive charge, somewhat larger than a hand grenade, marked the site with a quick flash of light and a cloud of dust.

"Good job," the "special" remarked as she rose to her feet. "Let's pack up and get out of here."

Three minutes later the strike team was heading east with their mission accomplished. It was 0335 hours, May 6th.

_**May 6, 2006 – Eastern Chalcidice**_

"What happened here?" A Gabrielle asked rhetorically, since if she didn't know then no one there did. She was looking around at the slightly burnt and abandoned town of Arethoussa that lay just off the road they'd been following north. As expected, no one answered her question.

"It doesn't look as badly burned as Rendina did," another ventured.

"At least now I have an idea of what a kilometer is," a third commented. Arethoussa was supposedly 15 kilometers from Rendina, and they'd been walking for about three hours.

A clone walked up to the group and reported that the scavenging detail had picked the small grocery clean and they were ready to move out again.

"That didn't take long," one of the Gabrielles remarked, then realized it wouldn't take several dozen of her sisters long at all to clean out a place the size of the store she'd seen.

The clones began walking again. It wasn't even time for an early dinner yet.

The next town they passed was Stefanina, which they could see from the road. It sat astride a short spur off the highway and looked like nothing more than a few shacks with a closed gas station. The Gabrielles didn't even bother to stop. Another 11 kilometers north lay the town of Limni. They didn't stop there either, only noting that it was smaller than Stefanina and slightly less scorched. Twenty minutes later, they came to a dead end where the road they'd been walking on ran into a road from the west. A sign pointing that direction said:

Sohos 16 km

In the opposite direction, pointing east, the sign said:

Nigrita 19 km

The Gabrielles filed past it heading east, and were pleased when the road began to curve north after an hour of walking. By then it was 1830 hours. Finally, at 1900 hours, the Gabrielles arrived at the deserted town of Therma. They had passed a road leading east a couple miles before, but had decided to stay on the road leading north. Now they were again confronted with a road leading east, headed to someplace called Ahinos, according to a sign. The clones decided that it was time for dinner. The ones at the head of the column stopped. The rest caught up. Soon, they were preparing meals in the abandoned restaurants and kitchens of Therma. They ate and left their dishes in sinks all over town. Afterwards, they went to sleep in houses, businesses, and yards.

Ironically, the road they had passed just two miles back led directly to Amphipolis. It was the very same road that Secunda had marched west by that morning. In fact, the Gabrielles had missed the "special" and her outbound mortar company by about six hours. More surprisingly, the Destroyer's scouts had missed them, since the bulk of the _kataskopoi _were ranging further north and west in Chalcidice during the assault mission.

The Gabrielles had moved on paved roads, leaving no tracks. They'd spent the last two nights bunking in abandoned towns. They hadn't made campsites, left hearths or fires, or otherwise disrupted the landscape with the passage of their numbers. A combination of circumstances and timing allowed the "not an army" of 8,000 blonde clones to pass unseen only 20 miles from the Destroyer's encampment. The Hellene's Bane would have been livid if she'd found out. As it was, only a rumor of their passing would reach her ears, and she'd soon have more immediate things to worry about.

_**May 7, 2006 – The Strymon Vale, Macedonia**_

"The mission was accomplished yesterday at 0330 hours, _Strategos_," Secunda reported at the dawn _synedrion_, "all six shells found their mark within the enemy encampment. We followed the prepared shells with one HE round to confirm the strike zone visually."

"Excellent," Xena remarked. "Once they start fallin' ill, they'll have to abandon their camp. We'll force them to do that before they're ready. Any engagements, Secunda?"

"I took the heads of six who were on patrol when I reconnoitered the target to confirm the range and bearing," the "special" answered without a trace of emotion. "It was purely opportunistic. Other than that, no." The _strategos _grinned.

"Anything further to report?" The Destroyer of Nations asked.

"Only an impression, _Strategos_," Secunda answered after a moment's hesitation. "On our return march I was struck by an impression of warmth, as of Helios' beams. It was more of a feeling however, than a physical sensation. I discerned no physical source. Upon analysis, I must liken it to the feelings I experience when contemplating memories of the one called Gabrielle. The impression persisted for perhaps a quarter-hour as we marched east. The others felt it too, though less distinctly. This was in the area east of Sohos, about 20 miles from Amphipolis. It came from the north."

Xena said nothing, though she had stared at Secunda for several moments. She immediately recalled an incident of similar sensations that she herself had experienced. It had been on January 21st and she had been aboard the Miss Artiphys, cruising south along the East African coast. There, off the shore of northern Tanzania, both she and Prima had felt an inexplicable…"something".

_"You felt it too," Xena said. It was not a question._

_"I felt…something," Prima acknowledged, making neither judgements nor conjectures._

_Both clones eventually came to face towards the distant land off the starboard side. The enhanced "special's" finely tuned senses pinpointed what Xena could only feel vaguely._

_"It comes from there," she stated with certainty, lifting her arm and pointing 60º off the starboard beam. _

_"Yes," Xena agreed, then, almost too softly to be heard, "like a second sunrise…"_

It was the Gabrielles, 8,000 of them. The realization came to Xena with gut certainty and the clarity of a revelation. Secunda had triggered it when she'd likened the feeling of warmth to what she felt when she contemplated the memories of a soulmate she'd never known. It was the very warmth that had kept her own _katalepsis_ at bay for a lifetime, and had allowed the Warrior Princess to be. That warmth she had once known was now magnified 8,000-fold; she had no doubt that any of her clones could feel its presence. It's often called love, Xena thought, but a love that consumes yet doesn't destroy; a love that can preserve the human soul in one born of a god to conquer, ravage, and slaughter. Yes, it's more than just love, but there is no word…no name….

She resisted the urge to dispatch corps of scouts to search the hills of Chalcidice for the cloned Gabrielles and roust them out. What would she do with them if she found them? She couldn't allow her army to be distracted, especially not now. She couldn't allow herself to be distracted. This was not her Gabrielle, not her soulmate, not her love. And now, she realized, it's a love that can never be. There's already too much water under the bridge and too much blood on the road ahead. What I feel now instead of love is given to War. You, Secunda, and all my clones will never know a soulmate, the Destroyer of Nations decided. There is a war to fight.

"Take a crew of fifty and board the Argo," Xena ordered a _hecatontarches_. "Sail her clear of Kavala and then use the coordinates of Athena's camp as your target. Fire a cruise missile every hour for the first three hours, then one every half-hour for the next three hours. Don't bother with warheads. I want the enemy driven out of their camp, sick, demoralized, and with only the supplies they can carry. At the same time, a crew of twenty will board the Miss Artiphys and sail to the Thermaic Gulf to observe the ports. Immediately call the Argo if there is any suspicion that the enemy can move by sea. Destroy any ship that could be used as a troop transport. Speed is our ally."

_(The impact energy of a 600 lb. cruise missile traveling at 6,000 mph is far greater than the explosive power of a conventional warhead small enough to arm the missile. A 300 lb. half-scale missile had caused major building collapses at USAMIIRID.) Editor_

"I want the _kataskopoi_ in western Chalcidice to move onto the Axios Plain and keep the enemy under tighter surveillance," the Destroyer ordered the commander of the scouts. "Move them into visual range. I want to know when they march and where they are." After a brief pause, she continued with, "None of the scouts are to enter the area north of the road in eastern Chalcidice unless they are shadowing the enemy's advance."

Last, the _strategos_ ordered, "Begin brewing the herbs that have been collected. I want the Pharmacopoeia of War prepared. There are a thousand ways to use plants as allies." Every clone present recalled the lessons of Mithridates.

Xena's clones nodded their understanding and left the tent to carry out her orders. Finally the war would move toward its conclusion, and it would begin on their timetable, not the enemy's. They would drive Athena's army to fight on the _strategos'_ terms and they would calculate every factor for their foe's detriment. As in the distant past, the Destroyer of Nations intended to take the field against an enemy half-defeated before they ever marched to battle.

As the tent stood empty and silent, the Hellene's Bane allowed herself one more thought. _Don't get in my way, Gabrielle._

_**May 7, 2006 – Eastern Chalcidice**_

"I didn't sleep very well last night, did you?" A sleepy Gabrielle asked as she tried to dig further under the blanket on a bed in a deserted home in Therma. It was already 10:00 am and no one else felt like moving either.

"I don't think anyone did," the nearest clone replied, rubbing her eyes and yawning. She stretched and looked around with bleary eyes. "A few hours past midnight I had the strangest sensation. I wanted to get up and run back down the road the way we came. I felt like there was something out there in the dark…something I needed to find."

"That's exactly how I felt," the first clone said. Not surprising since they were all the same and all felt the same things for the same reasons. "And I had a hard time going back to sleep even after the feeling faded away."

"I got up and went outside. A lot of the others were out there too, all staring south down the road. We talked a little. Everyone was awake. All of us wanted to go but something told us not to. Maybe it was a heart's warning. After a half-hour the feeling faded and we all went back inside, but I don't think anyone got back to sleep any easier than you."

Several other clones lying in the room sat up and nodded in agreement. They all looked sleepy. They had all been up in the dead of night. After a while, one gave in to necessity.

"I've gotta pee," she said, and climbed to her feet. She left the bedroom and headed to the bathroom. The others all realized that they had to go too. Not surprising, since they were all the same.

"Me next," another yelled after the departed clone, "and don't take a shower until we've all had a turn." A chorus of agreement followed from the others.

It was almost noon before the whole mob of Gabrielles had washed, eaten, and was ready to continue on their way. They assembled on the road, checked the weather, and set out north towards Nigrita, about an hour away. They chatted as they went, and the only topic of discussion was the previous night's disturbance. Somewhere along the way a clone said, "It was probably some of the Xenas…at least one or two. What else would feel like that?"

The whole "not an army" stopped in its tracks. They looked speculatively back the way they'd come.

"Oh, no you don't," the same clone declared, "if it was the Xenas, they're almost certainly at war, and this is not the time to go chasing off after them. You know how she got a couple of times. Remember what we've seen so far? Besides, every one of you felt the warning. This isn't the time. Now let's just get back on track, shall we?"

Though it would be impossible to tell visually, there was a good chance that this was the same clone that had been soaked with water at the monastery of Dochairios and had prodded the group onto the road at Trypiti. Perhaps the combination of individual experiences she'd had in this life had conspired to make her just a hair different from her sisters. Though they had all started out the same, they were each a separate person now. With each day that passed, each incident in their lives, they became more and more unique individuals. Of course, they had been traveling the same road together so far, so the differences had been minimized. Nevertheless, the first evidence of personality differentiation was beginning to appear.

The clones contemplated her words and slowly they turned back to face north. Every one of them wanted to go east in answer to the spectral call of their longing for their soulmate. But every one of them knew the truth of the one clone's words. They all had memories of the Destroyer of Nations. Soon, they were trudging back up the road towards Nigrita.

Around 1:00 pm the Gabrielles were exploring Nigrita. It had been deserted like the other towns they'd come across in the interior of Chalcidice. Here they saw no fire damage. The large town was a good 20 miles from the blast. Still, something had made the people flee and the clones quickly came to the conclusion that it had been fear. A war was being fought nearby. The Gabrielles examined the markets and stores and began loading up their shopping carts.

They were still in town when they heard the first direct evidence of battle. It passed them at 1:15 pm, almost before they could look up. Something had streaked overhead somewhat to the south, from east to west, blazing incandescent orange, and shattering the air with a series of deafening booms. Whatever it was hadn't been flying all that high, but it had covered the visible width of sky at many times the speed of any airplane they'd ever seen. It had moved far faster than anything they could imagine. Within seconds, silence returned.

"What was that?" More than one clone asked in alarm. Like many of their questions, it was rhetorical. If the speaker didn't know, then none of them did. There was no answer.

"Let's get out of here," another hastily suggested.

"It wasn't aimed at us," the clone who had convinced them to continue their march observed. "It probably flew at least to Macedonia…maybe even Epirus. You saw how fast it was moving. If it had been aimed at us, we'd all be dead by now."

The clones around her shivered. One by one, they realized it implied that someone on one side of them was shooting at someone on their other side. They were in the middle. Accidents happened. Only the idea that the enemies were distant kept them from packing up and trotting north immediately.

"Let's get the rest of the food loaded up," the same clone suggested. She moved to help stuff some cans into a shopping cart, but like her sisters, she couldn't keep from glancing up frequently and checking the sky.

Slightly less than a half-hour later another "thing" shrieked by in a more southerly direction. At first the Gabrielles weren't even sure if it had been another object.

At 2:15 pm the Gabrielles were on the road between Nigrita and the small town of Anthi, six kilometers to the north. The land was all downhill here. They had barely cleared the furthest edges of town when another "thing" shrieked by to the south. Again, the clones heard the rapid-fire series of sonic booms as the object traversed from horizon to horizon in a handful of heartbeats.

_(The distance from Amphipolis to Therme is only 50 miles, while the distance from Kavala to the Axius River is about 88 miles. Mach 8 cruise missiles travel at 6,000 mph, or 100 miles per minute. At that speed, the total flight time from launch to target impact is only about 52.8 seconds. The time to traverse Chalcidice, whose highlands circumscribed the Gabrielles' visual horizon, was about 30 seconds. What they were able to actually see from any given point, between landforms and trees, was probably far less.) Editor_

The fourth cruise missile streaked through the sky an hour later as the Gabrielles were walking north from Anthi. They had barely given the place a second look. The clones were heading for the town of Skoutari, 13-km north.

This time, a clone had been checking the sky for several minutes before the missile appeared, having already worked out the time interval. She filed the information away for future reference, as a detail for her journal. Another thing she'd noticed was that no one had noted any explosions, any flashes of light, or any evidence of a detonation. If they were setting off atom bombs, then the explosions were far away. She took this as proof of the target being someplace distant…perhaps in Epirus after all. Bombardment of enemy positions was a precursor to other actions or a constant during a siege. It made her breath easier, believing that they were nowhere near the field of battle.

The Gabrielles were so preoccupied with the sightings of the cruise missiles that the stream they crossed on the road overpass barely registered at all. Having descended from the highlands after passing Anthi, they were crossing a wide valley now, and on the other side lay Skoutari and then Seres.

**To Be Continued**


	10. Clonefic Part 3 Chapter 10

Clonefic

Part 3 Chapter 10

By Phantom Bard

**For Disclaimer**: See Part 3 Chapter 1

_**May 7, 2006 – The Northern Aegean**_

Xena's orders, given at the morning _synedrion_, had been eagerly welcomed by her troops. The first group had left on horseback immediately after the dawn meeting was dismissed. The twenty clones had ridden hard for Kavala, covering the thirty miles to the docks in an hour and a half. There they had greeted the guards and prepared the Miss Artiphys for sea. At 0900 hours, the acting captain had ordered the lines cast off, and the mission to observe the Thermaic Gulf began.

"Helm, make our bearing 180º and come to flank speed," the _praipositos_ ordered.

The pilot pushed the annunciator forward and the reactor came to full power. She turned the wheel to port until the compass indicated a course of due south. The waterjets spewed high-pressure blasts as they gimbaled to maintain the optimum angle of thrust, and the hydrofoil's bow rose as she accelerated. In a short time she was nose up at 14 knots, and the hull rose on its pylons until only the hydroplane wings were beneath the surface. The Miss Artiphys leapt forward to 30 knots, still accelerating.

Shortly later the vessel was skimming over the Aegean's surface at 90 knots, making her way south on the first leg of her course to the Thermaikos Kolpos.

"Retract the shroud and arm the Phalanx," the acting captain ordered. The weapons officer flipped a series of switches and the gun turret snapped around to face forward in response. "Extend the mast to three feet and set it for IR sensing, with half- magnification and standard alarms."

The acting first officer elevated the periscope a yard above the roof of the bridge. She programmed it to rotate in a full circle once every minute, and set the infrared sensor to sound an alarm if any heat sources were detected.

Forty minutes passed and the _praipositos_ ordered the first change of course.

"Navigation, confirm. Mt. Athos lies a league to starboard."

"Mt. Athos to starboard, Captain. Depth is 12 fathoms and two."

"Helm, turn to starboard and come to course heading of 240º. Maintain speed."

The Miss Artiphys would hold this course while skirting the peninsulas of Acte and Sithonia. At 90 knots it would take only about twenty minutes. Off the southern tip of Sithonia she would make an adjustment onto a more westerly course of 260º and run for another twenty minutes before heading north up the western coast of Kassandra. At that time, the_ praipositos_ would order the hydrofoil's speed reduced to a third. She would spy the bay at the north of the gulf where Therme, modern Thessaloniki, dominated maritime activities, sometime around 1300 hours. If her crew saw anything suspicious there, in the gulf, or in the small port towns along the way that they couldn't handle themselves, they would radio the Argo for backup. That backup would be a long time coming.

The fifty clones that would crew the Argo had started out from Amphipolis at a double-time jog. Having begun at 0700 hours, the thirty miles to Kavala would take an expected four to five hours, or until 1100 to 1200 hours. The submarine would be ready to sail by 1300 hours. It would begin its bombardment of Athena's camp as soon as it was safely clear of the port.

If the Miss Artiphys called the sub in for a torpedoing mission as well, then it would proceed at flank speed while submerged, stopping to surface each hour to launch another cruise missile. The process would be time consuming and unwieldy, and like most submarines, the Argo was actually much faster submerged. Unfortunately, once the first three hours had passed and the sub was firing once every half-hour, it would have to postpone any underwater actions. The time required to submerge, accelerate, decelerate, surface, raise the rail, charge the capacitors, load, and launch would leave almost no time for actually moving towards a target submerged. The best they would be able to do would be to move on the surface at a top speed of 16 knots. Realistically, it would be close to 2200 hours before the Argo could be in position to torpedo anything in the Thermaic Gulf.

At 1300 hours the Miss Artiphys rounded the cape where the town of Angalohoi overlooked the water. So far the crew had seen nothing suspicious. They had made their way north, examining the towns of mainland Chalcidice along the way, Nea Moudania, Magazara, Sozopoli, Nea Kalikratia, Nea Iraklia, Nea Mihahiona. Most were hole-in-the-wall fishing villages or resort towns. They hadn't seen a ship larger than 60 feet. Off their port side, the shipping lanes were deserted. There had been no container ships or traders, no passenger vessels or private yachts. Not even the fishing boats had left their docks. The water had been still and quiet all the way north.

The captain stared through the periscope and magnified the image. She was staring at the mouths of the Axios River. Nothing moved. Across five miles of water and land, she could even see the ribbon of highway E1 on its way to Thessaloniki. She observed the juncture with northbound E75. Nowhere did she see traffic. The land appeared to be dead.

At that moment, she and her crew heard the rapid-fire sonic booms of the first cruise missile. They were about 18 miles south of the target. Only moments after the booms there came a thunderous rolling crash, as if a meteorite had slammed into the ground. Though it was muffled by the distance, they all felt the concussion in the air. They would have sworn they'd felt it in their bones. The captain elevated the periscope and saw a distant column of dust rising into the sky. She could only imagine the terror it had struck into the hearts of their enemies. A grin curled her lips.

Ten minutes later, the Miss Artiphys approached the main harbor of Thessaloniki. They saw container ships and passenger ferries berthed, but no activity on the docks. All of the vessels were large enough to move troops in tactically significant numbers. They would all have to go. The captain had no weapons heavy enough to sink them.

"Radio the Argo," she ordered the communications officer, "there are five targets to be sunk at the port of Therme. Each is a potential troop transport. They aren't currently manned or ready to sail, but they can't be left intact."

The radio operator broke silence to transmit the message to the sub. Floating on the surface between Kavala and Thasos, the captain of the Argo acknowledged the message and requested the exact coordinates of the targets. Her next launch was scheduled in 58 minutes. She had both time and options.

"Stand off in the Thermaikos Kolpos around the headland at Angalohoi," the Argo's captain told the communications officer aboard the Miss Artiphys before signing off.

"Weapons officer, lock these coordinates into the guidance system of a cruise missile and have the ordinance detail load it on the rail."

The weapons officer looked at the captain for a moment before asking for clarification.

"Captain, our next launch isn't scheduled for 55 minutes. These coordinates are twenty-two miles southeast of the specified target."

"Exactly," the captain told her with a grin. "Hit it on the nose and we'll save ourselves a ten hour round-trip."

Twenty-eight minutes later a cruise missile shrieked from the launching rail at Mach 5.5. It came onto its course and the hydrogen injector went active, powering the scramjet engine to Mach 8. The weapon traveled for 52 seconds and slammed into the docks at the port of Thessaloniki. The impact left a crater a furlong in diameter, raised a shockwave in the harbor over thirty feet high, and briefly elevated the temperature at the impact site to 1600ºF. It destroyed every craft berthed in the bay and flattened buildings in a six-block radius. A column of dirt and smoke rose 600 yards into the air.

The Miss Artiphys motored around the cape five minutes later. Through the periscope at maximum magnification, the captain scanned the destruction. The Argo had not only removed the potential threat of the ships, but had rendered the port useless as well.

"Radio the Argo, targets destroyed," the captain ordered. "Helm, make our course for Kavala and come to flank speed."

Having seen the aftermath of the attack on Therme, the captain could only imagine the terror of their enemies as the Destroyer's weapons slammed into their camp while they fell sick with plagues. She and her sisters would be doing them a favor when they exterminated them in battle.

Twenty-two minutes after the Argo received the radio transmission from the Miss Artiphys, a second scramjet cruise missile screamed into the sky headed for the enemy's camp on the Axios river. By then the hydrofoil was nearing Nea Potidaea at the narrows of the Kassandra Peninsula. In ancient times the site had hosted the city of Potidaea and the peninsula had been called the Pallene. There were memories there for all of them.

Just there, the captain remembered, at the southwestern end of the Glyunthos Highlands where the land dips to the Pallene. It was late afternoon and I wasn't intending to go to Potidaea at all...had no business there. But then I heard voices, spied a line of slaves being herded by Draco's men, and I was in the mood for trouble. I never really saw eye to eye with Draco, and I never took slaves. Too indirect, too much business. I was more for knocking off the rich, an' citizen or warlord, it didn't matter. Anyway, I had to do something to get the blood flowing since I didn't have an army anymore. So I attacked the guards...only six of 'em as I remember. It wasn't much of a fight. They knew me on sight and they were terrified. Half of 'em fled without even crossing swords. That left me with the slaves. Have to admit, I was tempted to take 'em and sell 'em myself, just to have something to do. The captain chuckled but quickly fell silent. Then I saw her....

_**May 7, 2006 – Seres, Macedonia**_

It had been a long and unsetting day. On the road, the Gabrielles had witnessed eleven objects shrieking across the sky during a six-hour period between 1:15pm and 7:15pm. Other than the one suspected oddball flight that had been aberrant in its timing and course, they had discerned a regular timetable. The first four had come at one-hour intervals over three hours. After that, they had been overflown by the "things" every thirty minutes. The flight path seemed to be the same each time, and that had been their only source of comfort. Whoever was sending them wasn't aiming at them. The clones had continued up the road without stopping until they'd reached the city of Seres at 7:45pm. Their arrival had been interesting. For the first time there were people who would talk to them.

The city was subdued, but it was a pleasant evening and people were out on the streets. The Gabrielles entered from the west, pushing their shopping carts of food, all physically identical and all dressed the same. The people had seen something like this before, though on that occasion it had been just after midnight, and the invaders had been heavily armed. The incident had been a very frightening experience for them, but no one had been hurt. Like something out of a movie, it was far beyond anything they could have expected. It had been so odd that it was still the main subject of conversation.

When they'd first entered Seres, a group of citizens had approached them and asked if they should stay indoors again. This had puzzled the Gabrielles.

"What do you mean?" A curious clone had asked.

"Last time an army came here, the leader wanted everyone to stay inside," a man told her. "Of course it was after midnight, so it wasn't an unreasonable request." He had chuckled nervously and looked over the crowd of Gabrielles.

"An army came through here," the Gabrielle had asked, "who...when?"

"Well, like I said, it was just after midnight," the man had answered, "and they were all dressed in black uniforms. Ones I saw were carrying a lot of weapons. I really don't know who they were or exactly how many. I went inside like she asked."

"It was the early morning of April 22nd," a woman added, "and they came back the next night on their way south."

The Gabrielles pondered this news silently for a while. An army had moved through Seres going to and from a quick battle, perhaps a raid or an ambush. They looked north, up the valley.

"They went that way," a clone asked, pointing up the Strymon Vale, "and then back that way on their return?" She'd turned to point downriver towards Amphipolis.

"Actually, they went that way," the man clarified, pointing up the tributary into the highlands to the east, "but they left in that direction." He was pointing southeast where the Gabrielle had pointed. "Towards the sea."

The Gabrielles absorbed that news. The army had gone to the sea. They immediately thought of the submarine and the stilt boat they had later observed on the night of April 22nd. They thought of the atomic bomb someone had set off that evening.

"What did these soldiers look like?" The clone asked suspiciously.

The man answered nervously, as if someone would think him insane if he said aloud what they'd all seen.

"Like you, they looked identical, all of them," the man said, as he looked at the Gabrielles. "Wouldn't have known which was the leader if she hadn't spoken to us and ordered the others around. They were all tall women, with black hair and blue eyes, armed with rifles, pistols, and swords. Wore identical black uniforms. I don't know whose army they were. They spoke Greek to us but they weren't the Greek army. I know that because I'm a veteran."

The Gabrielles stood and stared. The description left no doubts in their minds. They were certainly clones and they could be clones of only one person...Xena. Mavican and Callisto were blondes, and Elainis had brown eyes. But how? Who had cloned Xena? For that matter, who had cloned Gabrielle herself? She'd been dead at the time and still had no idea who'd recreated her in this life. Had Xena also died like she had? The Gabrielles numbered 8,000; how many of Xena were there now?

"How many?" A Gabrielle asked.

"Thousands," the woman answered, "we saw thousands."

"Haven't seen them since though," the man added with obvious relief, "and there's nothing between here and the sea."

Not anymore, the Gabrielles thought. Not for a long, long time.

_**May 7, 2006 – The Strymon Vale, Macedonia**_

"The enemy has broken camp, _Strategos_," the _praipositos_ of a company of _kataskopoi_ reported at the _synedrion_ Xena had called at 2100 hours. The scout had ridden in haste all the way to Amphipolis to bring the general her news. "We observed them evacuating under duress between 1500 and 1800 hours yesterday."

"How did the troops look?" Xena asked.

"They were organized enough that I'd hesitate to use the term _rout_, but there was abnormal haste and a lack of coherent companies," the scout said, allowing herself a grin. "They did seem to be transporting some infected troops on travois," she added.

"Carts? Heavy weapons?"

"No heavy weapons, _Strategos_, but there were some supply carts and large numbers of cavalry."

That's your one advantage, Athena, Xena thought, but they can be dealt with easily enough. _Hippikon_ are a clear advantage only on open ground. Even then, large numbers are a mixed blessing. They need room to maneuver, pasture to graze, and lots of water.

"Where are they now?"

"They marched three leagues before stopping for the night about here," the scout said as she pointed to an area on the map.

"South and slightly west of Kilkis, at the margin of the Axios Plain, just shy of the highlands," Xena clarified for her other officers. "I want to force them onto highway E79 so they're heading for Seres. They'll hope they can enter the Strymon Vale north of us and drive us into the sea. I want them to come from the north, but letting them take the road all the way to Seres would be too easy. Their march should be demoralizing."

For several moments, Xena studied the map and then called up her memories of the terrain. Finally she reached a decision.

"Remember the Vertiskos Highlands in the eighteen miles of eastern Chalcidice before the land descends into the Strymon Vale? E79 passes into them between the modern towns of Karteres and Dorkada. Highway 12 parallels E79 to the south. I want to let the enemy get into the highlands on E79 so they're committed, then force them off the road so they have to struggle in the rough terrain."

She paused for a moment, improvising details for a plan.

"We have some explosives from airborne weapons taken off the Truman," she said, addressing the _hecatontarches _in charge of ordinance. "I want the charges from six of the Mk82s wired for remote detonation. They should be sufficient to destroy the road. Plant a pair of charges three miles east of the towns, another pair eight miles east, and the last pair one mile further. Blow the westernmost charges once the army's past them. Blow the eastern charges as the lead companies walk over them. Save the last pair for if they try to return to the road. After that they won't trust the highway anymore. It'll be our way of saying, welcome to Thrace."

_(The Mk82 is a general-purpose, unguided, 500lb "dumb" bomb. It carries an 89lb high explosive charge. The Mk82 was wildly popular during the war in Iraq, being cheap, destructive, and capable of deployment on any fixed wing aircraft in the coalition._ _ The USS Harry Truman carried several hundred of the ordinances for their air wing. The Destroyer's army had removed the high explosive charges from several dozen of them for use as general-purpose munitions.) Editor_

Around the tent the officers smiled. Of their cloned enemies, Elainis was from Argolis, Callisto from Phocis, and Mavican from Arcadia. All of them had looked down on Thracians as barbarians during their lifetimes. The Xenas, of course, were all from Thrace, and weren't above paying back some ancient geographical prejudices.

"Send your teams on horseback," Xena told the _hecatontarches_, "so the charges can be in place by morning."

Next she spoke to the _hecatontarches_ in charge of the _kataskopoi_.

"Keep the enemy under surveillance as you have. I believe they're headed for highway E79 on their own, but if they turn away we'll have to drive them there. Pass the word fast if that happens. You'll have backup in the field."

Last, Xena spoke to a _chiliarchos_.

"Dispatch two mortar squads with infantry support, under the command of a _hecatontarches, _to shadow the enemy. They are to fire at their discretion and keep them on course. Torment them. Force them onto E79 if necessary. Coordinate with the _kataskopoi_. I don't want to hear about any casualties of friendly fire." She reinforced her order with a stern look.

With that, Xena dismissed the _synedrion_. Finally, she thought, we are driving their army to battle on our terms. Now the offensive has clearly shifted and it lies in our hands. Every campaign has its turning point and this is it. But every campaign has its surprises too. There've already been a few in this war and I'm sure there'll be more. Still, I've seen the battle an' Ares' vision wouldn't lie.

_**May 13, 2006 – The Strymon Vale, Macedonia**_

It took the Destroyer of Nations' troops six days to drive the army of Athena across Chalcidice. As the _strategos_ had predicted, the clones were heading for highway E79. They'd crossed highway 65 on May 8th, just 9 miles south of Kilkis, while traveling southeast under the watchful eyes of Xena's _kataskopoi_. Along the way they began burying the first of their plague dead in shallow unmarked mounds, unwilling to stop to gather wood or make pyres. By the second day out, their horses were thirsting for water and dragging their hooves. More of Athena's clones died of influenza and Ebola.

On the third day of the march, the troops Xena had sent into Chalcidice detonated the first and second charges they'd planted in the highway. A score of cavalry at the lead of the column were blown apart. For a quarter-hour complete pandemonium reigned before the Elainises managed to restore order. They directed the column off the road and sent a cavalry wing ahead to scout the highway. The Xenas waited and restrained themselves from blowing the third charge. When the riders returned and reported the road ahead clear, the enemy moved out, bypassing the site of the explosion and returning to the road. The Xenas let 2,000 pass before detonating the third charge right in their midst.

As their _strategos_ had predicted, the enemy moved off the highway and refused to return to it afterwards. A carefully aimed mortar bombardment assured that they traveled thereafter to the north of the highway...opposite the spattering of deserted towns to the south along highway 12. The Destroyer of Nations intended to deny the enemy shelter, food, water, and a paved road to travel. They spent their fourth day in dry hilly terrain without a stream or spring for a dozen miles.

As per their general's orders, the Xenas began to bombard their enemies to torment and demoralize them further, once they'd come within 15 miles of the Strymon Vale. Throughout the fifth day they intensified their psychological assault. Now they lobbed mortar shells onto burial details, aimed for the margins of the pickets to traumatize the horses, and launched random shells into the enemy camp during their hours of sleep. They struck at the supply carts and into the midst of the marching columns during the day.

In the morning of the sixth day the enemy column met with a barrage of mortar shells, five miles west of the town of Strimoniko. The assault forced them south, back across highway E79, and lengthened their struggles in the rugged highlands west of the Strymon Vale. They were forced to shoulder their supplies and abandon their carts. The Destroyer's clones prolonged their march through the most inhospitable terrain in Chalcidice and drove them away from the city of Seres. In no way would she allow them the slightest comfort or relief, for Xena knew that Seres was inhabited, well supplied, and she had already spared it once.

So it was that on the evening of May 13th, the army of Athena almost tumbled down a long embankment into the Strymon Vale. They reached the river between the towns of Flambouro and Paralimnio, about 12 miles north of Amphipolis. The cavalry arrived first and began to drink and water their horses in squads while the rest kept a nervous watch. The first two score clones and their horses dropped dead within ten minutes, retching, convulsing, and finally falling into comas. When an Elainis arrived with the first of the infantry, she slew another six clones with her swords, recognizing the effects of Melampode, (Black Hellbore), poisoning.

"You idiots, Xena's famous for poisoning water sources!" She shrieked.

"Of course she is, the heartless bitch," one of the Callistos replied with a giggle, "that's why we let the Mavicans and the Achilleses test the water first."

"You might have just tested it with one horse!" The Elainis screamed. The Callistos had never been team players and she resented being shackled to them in her goddess' service. Many times she'd wondered what Athena had been thinking to clone them.

The Callisto nibbled on a fingernail and whispered "Oops," while expressing more amusement than contrition. She added, "Our dear Xena also uses Atropa, (Deadly Nightshade), which doesn't affect horses."

The Elainis stared at her.

"Wait a half-hour and it'll wash downstream," the Callisto said in a bored tone of voice, "I'll bet Xena's downstream dunking rats and waiting until they stop dying before letting her own troops drink again."

"You think she's downstream?" The incredulous Elainis asked. "She'd poison her own water too? Common sense says she'd be upstream in Seres. She just finished driving us away from there."

"My lovely Xena would have stored plenty of water for herself," another Callisto told her with a sigh of twisted longing, "and of course she's downstream. Amphipolis is downstream. She's been driving us here for the last week, bright one, and I'm sure she's got lots of plans for us." She sat down on a boulder and dipped a hand in the water, then brought a finger to her lips, tasting a single drop. "Mmmmmm, Xena," she moaned theatrically, "bad girl."

It took another two hours for the entire army to make their way into the Strymon Vale from the highlands. By then, the water was safe to drink. Twelve miles downstream in Amphipolis, a clone reported that the rats were surviving the Strymon, and the Destroyer of Nations declared the river safe for her troops. They, however, continued to drink from the tributary stream that ran past the _strategos_' tent for the rest of the night.

"_Strategos_, the enemy presents a curious organization for an army," Prima reported at the evening _synedrion_. "They appear divisive, without a coherent command structure, and grossly lacking in discipline."

Xena raised an eyebrow at her "special's" words, encouraging her to continue with her observations.

"I stood cloaked with four others only a dozen yards away after poisoning the water when the enemy went to drink. Clones of Mavican and Achilles drank and died. They didn't even bother to test the water first. Though it was the first time we'd allowed them free access to water, only the Callistos were suspicious. They looked on with gleeful anticipation while their comrades poisoned themselves. Then the first Elainis arrived and slew six more clones and cursed them for drinking. She and the Callistos argued. Though it appeared that the Elainis was in command, the Callistos knew us best but only shared their insights for the sake of belittling the Elainis. This can't be an efficient way to run an army."

In the command tent blue light flared, flickering in blinding flashes that peppered the canvas with shadows. The clones squinted but didn't flinch away. They had all seen this before.

Ares appeared before his Favorite, and he was laughing uproariously. It took some time before he was composed enough to speak to the clones. They waited indulgently.

"My sister, brilliant as she is, has created a large mob of individuals, not an army," he told them. "Think, Xena," he said to his Chosen, though all the clones took his words as directed to themselves; they were all Xenas, after all. "Elainis was a masterful fighter and Athena's Favorite, but she never fought at Ilios...she never commanded an army. She and Achilles come from a time of heroic champions and hoplite phalanxes, when ranks clashed in lines of battle on cleared fields or fought duels for personal glory. They are not strategists as you were trained to be. Military command was conferred by royal birth, not martial ability. Callisto and Mavican, deadly as they are, were also never suited to mass military actions. Callisto thinks only of herself and her vengeance. This has not changed. She is not a 'team player' and thousands of her, even less so. They barely cooperate among themselves and regard the others with derision. Mavican is simply a follower, first of Callisto, and now of Athena. She was strong and violent but never a tactician. Athena's army has no ingrained cohesiveness. They are a mass of individuals only united by their allegiance to Athena and their hatred of you."

He turned to survey the officers in the tent around him and pride shone clearly on his face. This was an army! More cohesive, united, and disciplined than any that had ever moved to battle in all the long history of war. Individually they were brilliant. En mass, virtually unbeatable. His Favorite had foreseen the necessities of a command structure as if by second nature, and had bred and trained her troops to be an efficient unit. By the gods, they took the forms of military protocol as a given and most could conceive of no other way. A lifetime spent at war long ago had prepared Xena to command today. His brilliant sister had cloned a mob deadly fighters and killers. His recreated daughter had bred an army.

In all the long history of his existance he had never felt such pride, such certainty of victory, or such validation of himself. Without offering a prayer, the Xenas' very existance was a mode of worship. His Way...the values he personified, had been realized and perfected by the achievements of his daughter. Never before had an army been poised to reap such glory. Never again would an army so closely manifest his domain on Earth. Here, mortal and immortal merged in something he could only see as destiny. And it had been worth every slowly passing year of the long wait to see it.

A year after Xena and Gabrielle had died in Rome, Ares had still not chosen a successor to be his Favorite. Xena had been a hard act to follow. His primary candidate was his own granddaughter, Eve, a warrior of his blood, sworn to vex Rome. She was a natural choice, and as a warrior, her mother's lessons were beginning to bear fruit. It was then that the Moirae had appeared to him, something that had only occurred a handful of times, and only then when the necessity was dire.

"_God of War, hear my words," Atropos the crone began. She often spoke first._

"_Though dead your daughter's spirit must live again," Lachesis continued._

"_And with her, her soulmate must live as well," Clotho added in her childish voice._

"_To save yourself, their blood must flow," Lachesis the matron warned ominously._

"_Down eternity's halls to future days," Atropos declared to Ares' relief._

"_Into bodies identical to those in their graves," Clotho added, childishly pleased with her little rhyme. Here, the God of War's eyes had widened...they spoke of destiny._

"_For they are the vessels in whose molds shall be made," Lachesis said._

"_The many upon whom your fate will be laid." Old Atropos finished._

"_So you're saying both Xena and Gabrielle must leave descendants to form lineages that will be my salvation in the future?" Ares asked, hoping for clarification without the doubletalk._

_The three Fates had stared at him, and as always, they seemed to have a secret. _

"_Your Favor in the present to the enemy must go," Clotho told the God of War._

"_So that both families down the road of time can grow," Atropos completed the rhyme._

_And with that he had known what he had to do. One did not ignore the Moirae's advice._

It had been in the spring of 43 BC when he'd appeared in the Amazon village. Only a single young warrior saw him, and this was his intention. Hope was 16, but already she'd displayed exceptional abilities. Her teachers had been the best of their generation. She had known him from her mother's stories of Xena and she had shown no fear, asking only what the God of War sought among Artemis' people. He had spoken plainly and without intrigue. She had accepted. The Warrior Princess had always been a hero to her.

Gabrielle's daughter became the next Favorite of the God of War. Ares had picked up training her where her mothers had left off and she became an acknowledged prodigy. Within two years Hope earned the rank of Amazon Master Warrior, joining veterans who were mostly in their thirties. And then only a year later she had challenged and defeated the reigning War Queen, Varia. Not since Antiope had ascended to that position 1,102 years before had one so young led the nation's warriors. Her first act had been to halt the nation's "Oath of Blood", the vendetta against Livia, by then known as Eve.

For the first time, the God of War had chosen a Favorite with no intention of inciting a string of conquests. Hope's mission was defensive. She was to preserve her mother's bloodline and indirectly, her mother's soulmate's as well. She was buying time for fate.

Eve had worked hard to absorb her mother's lessons, but she'd only had two years of training with Xena following her liberation from Rome. She became a highly competent warrior, but never anything close to what her mother had been. Ares had often wondered what she would have done with his Favor and his training. He suspected that her path would have been littered with the bodies of Amazons, perhaps Hope among them, slain as they'd tried to satisfy the vendetta. Instead, by the time both women had died, as the mothers of children with children of their own, he'd known his choice had been correct. The families of Xena and Gabrielle were on their way to their future destiny, somewhere down the road of time.

"We have no doubts that we will prevail," Xena told her god. "With your Blessing and our strength we will conquer."

"Yet one factor troubles you," he told her, for Ares knew her mind and he had seen the events unfold. But beyond this, there was still that ancient rhyme from the Moirae.

"There are always uncertainties in war," the Destroyer of Nations replied, "but we are prepared."

The God of War smiled. Yes, she was prepared. The army was prepared. But there most definitely were uncertainties, and the results of those, even he could not foresee. The situation reeked of fate, and how that fate would clash with destiny and be resolved..._ainissesthai..._enigma. Still, his intuition spoke and he trusted it.

"They all live for you."

His words had sounded ambiguous. Athena would take them as references to Xena's clones, but he knew that eventually Xena would know. Another flash and he was gone.

_**May 15, 2006 – The Strymon Vale, Macedonia**_

Helios rose to light Amphipolis but the land there was empty. Not a soul moved. The Destroyer's army was gone, leaving only footprints, wheel ruts, and filled in waste pits. On May 14th Xena had led half her clones north up the Strymon while the other half broke camp. The rest had followed her that evening. She had pulled in her _kataskopoi_ and combined them with the infantry. They had marched north for barely five miles.

As dawn opened the 15th of May, Xena stood on the hill she had first seen in Ares' vision. The sun behind her projected her shadow, long and dark, but it disappeared in the shadow of the slope below and she smiled. It was just as she had foreseen.

She gazed up the river towards Seres and the mountains to the north. The Strymon road wound beside the river, hemmed in for the next three miles by high cliffs to the east. Behind her those cliffs failed and a valley opened through which to Apollo's light poured, glinting off the waters of a small tributary stream. It lit the tents of her army, encamped near the valley's mouth. To the west, at the hill's feet, the Strymon road passed before a narrow field just over a furlong wide, and beyond that lay the vast swamp that had once been the bed of Lake Cercinitis.

Two shadows moved up beside her, having climbed the hill to join their _strategos_.

"Have the preparations been made?" Xena asked.

"Yes, _Strategos_," two identical voices replied.

"You know what to do," she told them, "may the hand of Ares guide you whether to victory or death. Today the final battle begins. Drive them here. Break them."

In the blink of an eye the shadows were gone.

In the encampment of Athena's army the troops prepared for battle. They had rested for a day to recuperate from their laborious march across Chalcidice. It hadn't really been long enough to regain their strength, but worse, it hadn't been long enough to repair their morale. They were not a boisterous or confident army. There was none of the boasting and oath making so typical of an army on the verge of a long awaited battle. They had been infected, forced from their camp with heavy casualties, and then driven across Chalcidice like livestock. In the last miserable week almost five thousand had died along the way, of influenza, small pox, Ebola, and hostile actions. Their horses were lagging, malnourished, still affected by dehydration, and skittish.

The Elainises had become determined to assault the Destroyer of Nation after being convinced by the Callistos that she lurked downriver in Amphipolis. Much as they hated the Callistos, Athena's Favorites had persuaded themselves to act on the crazed blondes' knowledge of the enemy. The decision itself grated on their ego and sense of superiority. Callisto had been a peasant even more so than Xena, having been born in a one-goat village in Phocis. Beyond the social strata aspect was the fact that the Elainises perceived Callisto's madness and had no sympathy for the insane. Such unfortunates were cursed by the Erinyes and the gods had turned their backs on them. Plus, they were annoying as hell.

The Callistos seemed to be perennially amused, having known Xena best. They didn't even pretend to care what happened to their comrades, for as in their original life, their sole obsession was achieving their personal vengeance on the Warrior Princess. They laughed at the hardships of the others, withheld information simply because they could, and maintained a flippant and derisive relationship with the Elainises. They regarded the Achilleses as dolts and blade fodder and the Mavicans as a waste of flesh since even Gabrielle could defeat her. The Callistos despised both equally, though for different reasons, and rejoiced in their suffering. The Cirrans expected to desert when it became advantageous to do so.

The Achilleses were the quintessential chauvinistic macho male prototypes. They chaffed under the command of the Elainises and looked down their noses at the other female warriors. They regarded the Callistos as undisciplined psychotics and the Mavicans as walking breasts. In camp, they'd found themselves segregated even more thoroughly than the other cadres. The fact that they were more deadly with ancient weapons than the Callistos or Mavicans had led to a number of duels and deaths. Their disposition had been worsening over the months of the campaign, in part because their memory was that of Iphigenia, a betrothed lover, not of Elainis, the Favorite of Athena that she had become after his debarkation to Ilios. When it became apparent that the situation between them was greatly changed, the Achilleses sulked and became bitter, violent, and disposed to drama.

The Mavicans kept increasingly to themselves. They resented being commanded by an elitist bitch, leered at by their male comrades, and humiliated by their one time teacher. They felt little connection to the others, wondered how the supposed destiny Callisto had once convinced her to grasp had landed them here, and entertained thoughts of simply walking away from it all. They'd never cared much for any of the gods, and their ancient loss to the Warrior Princess' soulmate in 59 BC had soured them on the God of War. If any of the cloned ancients felt lost in the modern world, it was the Mavicans. And they despised it, every minute of it. Now that they were alive again, they had no idea of what to do, and so they went along with the rest of the army for lack of better options. They would only be fighting because deserting would earn them a vendetta from the other clones in Athena's army while not making them any friends among Xena's.

All in all, it was a wonder that these mutually antagonistic elements had cooperated as far as they had. Only the Elainises were truly committed to their goddess and her war. Even they were beginning to have doubts. The army had already lost over 36,000 troops. They'd been profoundly shocked when their plan had failed so disastrously in April. Their goddess had been outthought by a mortal! Now the 29,000 survivors were preparing for a march on the city and an attack the following day. It was two hours past dawn and they would set out at the third hour.

A league to the south, 2,000 of Xena's clones waited in the steep wooded slopes beside the road to the east. Each was armed with a sword, dagger, chakram, and their recently completed bows. They stood invisibly cloaked, behind trees and boulders, silent and barely breathing. They waited and watched as mounted scouts from Athena's army passed up and down the road in advance of their march, searching for signs of their enemies. So far, they had found nothing, but that would soon change.

At 0910 hours, two-and-a-half hours after dawn, the watching clones saw a troop of scouts galloping north up the road. They were hastening back to their camp to report the sudden appearance of the Destroyer's army on the road.

It took the Elainises only a half-hour to goad their troops into order and march south to meet the Xenas. For once they would not be taken unawares in an ambush or assaulted while in camp. They planned to march out and meet the Destroyer's clones in battle where their superior numbers would win the day.

In the meantime, the Xenas had moved north to within a league of the enemy camp. They could see their sisters in the woods protecting their right flank, while the swampy ground and the river protected their left. Soon the enemy column appeared, fronted by the Achilleses in a full hoplite phalanx, twenty abreast across the pavement, shoulder to shoulder and shield to shield. They marched with their spears held vertical, helmets in place, in perfectly matched strides. Behind them came the others in no particular order, with wings of cavalry riding along the western margin of the infantry, in the grass just off the road. It was 1040 hours and they were now 9 miles north of Amphipolis, but only 4 miles north of the _strategos_.

The Xenas blocked the road, standing in a matching twenty abreast battle order with their swords drawn, but there were only 2,000 of them. They stood, 20 files wide per rank, and 100 ranks deep. The enemy advanced and the Xenas let them, standing frozen in pace like statues save for their hair, gently animated by the slight gusts of breeze. The armies closed to a furlong, then 150 yards, and then 75. At 50 yards, the hoplite front ranks lowered their spears to horizontal with a sharp whoosh and snap of ash shafts on callused palms. Still the Xenas waited.

At 25 yards, the silence was shattered. From within the formation of Xenas, 400 arrows hissed from bows hidden in the 2nd through 21st ranks. Bodies fell, shot in the necks or through the eye slits of their helmets. The front rank of Xenas never blinked as the arrows whipped over and between them, tousling their hair as they sped past. Instead, they raised their swords. The 22nd through 100th ranks executed a lateral movement to form a narrow "V" with 21 ranks at its forward point. Then the newly revealed ranks fired. A volley of 1,580 arrows slammed into the ranks of Athena's army and more bodies began to fall. The enemy continued to advance. The Xenas matched them, taking one step back for each step the enemy took forward. They maintained the same distance and continued firing; 20 paces, 400 arrows, 20 more paces, 1,580 arrows, and then 20 more paces again. In this way, they drew out the engagement with their limited supply of arrows. Their goal at this point was just to keep the enemy moving forward while frustrating them with casualties.

It was during the third round of archery that the enemy cavalry broke into a canter and moved to flank the Xenas on their left. They were hampered by the soft ground between the road and the river, and the uncertain footing it offered their horses. They maneuvered even with where the Xenas front rank had originally stood and suddenly a huge explosion tore the morning air. Bodies and parts of horses were flung skyward. The entire column shuddered, and for a moment their advance faltered. A charge, barely concealed in the weeds, had been tripped with a simple wire by a horse. It was another of the 89lb charges taken from a Mk82 bomb, one of many set along the road the night before. As the "specials" had assured their general at dawn, the preparations had been carefully made.

The march continued. Athena's army advanced. Xena's clones retreated. Arrows whizzed through the air. Every so often, a blast shook the ground, either tripped by the enemy or shot with an arrow. After half an hour, the column had completely passed the clones waiting unseen in the woods. At about the same time, the 2,000 Xenas who were acting as bait ran out of arrows.

Still retreating 25 yards ahead of their enemies, the Xenas pulled in the wings of their "V" and reformed into a column 20 files wide. Hidden by their sisters' bodies, the rearmost clones cloaked themselves and slipped away into the woods. This continued until only the foremost 20 ranks remained. At that point the remaining Xenas backpedaled double-time. Predictably, Athena's army increased the pace of its advance. This continued for most of a quarter-hour, with 28,000 mindlessly pursuing 400 forward, and the whole engagement accounting for about 3 miles of travel towards Amphipolis. Now high barren cliffs had risen beside the road to the east. It left only a mile to the battlefield chosen by the Destroyer of Nations.

Now the Xenas who had waited in the woods decloaked and moved onto the road. They jogged after their enemies, and as they advanced, the 1,600 clones that had slipped away from the forward company earlier joined them and drew their swords. These 3,600 fell upon their enemy's rear guard, shooting arrows at close range and slaying the fallen wounded.

_(The Xenas had been ordered to fabricate both their bows and arrows when they'd first set up camp at Amphipolis. The Destroyer of Nations had known the value of_toxotès_, but also knew their arrows wouldn't penetrate Athena's armor. Gabrielle had died because her last shot had failed to slay the Elainis at their school in Columbia. Xena opted for the psychological as well as tactical benefits of archery. Her clones had cast their arrowheads out of lead melted down from their rifle bullets. These would have had no chance of penetrating even ancient armor, and so they hadn't been formed like the sharpened bladed heads of bronze war arrows. They more closely resembled pointed raisins. Their rugose surface was perfect for holding a resinous coating of botanic toxins. This tar-like melange, taken from Mithridates' Pharmacopoeia of War, included aconite, black and white hellbore, and atropa. The wounds burned violently as soon as inflicted even through a glancing abrasion, and this effect declared their toxic nature. A very small dose affected a body's cardiac functions, bringing on heart palpitations and arrhythmias. It also produced a pronounced narcotic effect, with cardiac and respiratory depression, numbing, delirium, staggering, slurred speech, and vertigo. Xena had intended to use the archers only at close range and had never anticipated causing many direct fatalities. The tactical advantage was in terror and debilitation. It was another way to degrade her enemy's capabilities.) Editor _

While Athena's front ranks chased the retreating Xenas, the rear guard fled those attacking from behind. The yards of the final mile slipped away uncounted as Xena's enemies advanced down the road. They would follow the Xenas all the way to Amphipolis and drive them into the sea beyond the river's mouth. This, in fact, had been their goddess' original battle plan, and some of them saw it being recapitulated now.

The cavalry cautiously paced the infantry, never knowing when the next explosion would rip through their column. None of them wanted to be in the lead. This was exactly the effect the _strategos_ had hoped to promote, that with a handful of charges she could neutralize the very real threat of the _hippikon_. Her plan would have ended in a bloody disaster had Athena's cavalry thrown caution to the wind and ridden down the Xenas. The cavalry however, was made up primarily of Elainises and Callistos, neither of whom was overly willing to sacrifice themselves. Both preferred fighting individual foes on foot, face to face, where they could watch their victim's eyes and see their blades drawing blood. As yard after yard passed beneath their boots, the enemy clones failed to realize that the number of Xenas behind them was dwindling as clones cloaked themselves and slipped away.

The march had advanced to a scant hundred yards from the battlefield the Destroyer of Nations had chosen when a tremendous explosion ripped through the air. Clods of dirt, sod, smoke, and clouds of dust obscured all mortal sight. The report was louder than a thunderclap. Tremors in the ground and the concussion in the air deafened and staggered the clones in both forces. The blast was centered to the west of the road, about 30 yards behind the enemy's front rank, and not actually among the cavalry, but adjacent to them. Already skittish horses panicked and many threw their riders. Some bolted. All the remaining Xenas behind Athena's army cloaked themselves and disappeared. They hastened south, sprinting down the 30-yard corridor between the cliffs and the road.

When the dust and dirt cleared, Athena's clones faced the massed forces of the Hellene's Bane. Almost 8,000 clones of Xena stood on the road and among the trees in the narrow space beneath the cliffs that had risen to the east. They were motionless and they were silent. Each held a drawn broadsword in her right hand and a Combined Chakram in her left. They stared at their enemies from as little as 30 yards away, solemn, deadly, and projecting a palpable aura of menace. One among them stepped forward.

"In the name of the God of War," she yelled as she raised her sword, "victory or death!"

And then the 8,000 clones of the Destroyer of Nations charged. They hit their full stride still twenty yards from their enemies and they never stopped. They came on like screaming banshees, ululating that same bloodcurdling Thracian war cry that had chilled the stricken city of Rome on the night in 46 BC when Xena and her soulmate had retaken Eve from Caesar. From 8,000 throats it rent the air and the spirits of the warriors facing them. The diversionary explosion of a moment before was completely forgotten. As it had since 1,400 BC, when Thracian had fought Scythian, it struck terror into the enemy's hearts and paralyzed them for a crucial few seconds. In those seconds, all the previous weeks' suffering, fear, and frustration converged on the enemy's spirits like the fallen roof of the Temple of the Chakram. With it, all their courage evaporated like a dream.

The Xenas fell upon their enemies with sword and chakram; the momentum of their bodies slamming back those who opposed them as if they were mounted warriors rather than _euzonos_. They aimed for the eye slots in helmets, the throats, and the wrists. The unnerving warbling whine of cast chakrams screamed among the combatants. Here was the unstoppable violence and the _katalepsis_ that was Ares' Blessing. Here was the advantage of the divine genetic gift a father had passed on to his daughter over 2,000 years before. Like Xena, every one of her clones was possessed of a metabolism 42% more efficient than an ordinary mortal's. Here was the terror of the Daughter of War. They swung with leaf-bladed swords and ring bladed chakrams, drawing blood, laughing, possessed by bloodlust, and reveling in the slaughter. They took wounds and kept coming without a glance at their own blood flowing. For the first time since their awakening, they truly lived.

What good was the Achilleses' hoplite _ektaxis_ against a foe that could flip over them and apply _"The Annihilation of the Line"_? What good did the advantage of numbers avail the Callistos and Mavicans against warriors who knew _"The Smashing of the Wheel"_? And what hope had the Elainises against the mastery of the perfected _"Katalepsis"_?

Slowly at first, and then with increasing speed, Athena's clones gave way. 8,000 had faced off against 28,000, and still the larger army was overmatched. The tide of the Destroyer's forces was unstoppable in those moments. Never in all of history had an enemy faced such an overwhelming combination of skill and lethal obsession. In Xena, Ares had unleashed the closest thing to the wrath of the gods in the modern world.

To those facing her on the frontal and eastern flanks, even the appearance of a modern army wouldn't have encompassed the same measure of terror. This was the horror of ancient combat distilled. Phobos and Deimos walked the battlefield and bestowed their nightmare breath upon Athena's troops. The enemy backpedaled, trod over their own fallen, and finally turned their backs and fled. Infantry and cavalry alike turned blindly west off the road in a rout. They ran across soggy ground, their feet sinking ankle-deep in muck, tripping over waterlogged tussocks of coarse weeds and slipping on mud. Some fell on their faces and crawled. Some went knee deep into the swamp before the pursuit slacked off. Horses stood in water up to their bellies, wild eyed and shivering. Many of the warriors, Elainis, Callisto, Achilles, or Mavican alike found their legs wet with a warmer water of their own making.

By the time they'd stilled their heaving lungs and shaking limbs, the Xenas had drawn themselves up in a battle line back near the road. They stood still and silent, watching and waiting. Between the two forces lay scarcely a furlong of corpse littered ground. The Xenas stood until their defeated enemies sank to their knees and threw down their arms. Then they withdrew in ordered ranks down the road to the south. They would accept no surrender. The war was not over and the Destroyer of Nations had never taken prisoners for the sake of mercy. There was no place left in this world for the vanquished.

The actual battle had lasted all of fifteen minutes. The death toll, just over 2,000.

For the first time in weeks, clouds gathered overhead, and by evening, a slow and steady rain had begun to fall. Unlike a brief and singular thunderstorm, this weather was highly abnormal in the Mediterranean dry season. The Goddess of Wisdom weeps, the _strategos_ thought, and she smiled. Like the battle, it had been foreseen.

Less then a half-mile south of the miserable, swampy camp where Athena's army had been driven, a valley opened to the east. The tributary stream swelled with runoff and raised the swamp's level slightly for the defeated army's torment, though most of its waters flowed south towards the sea. At the valley's mouth stood the tents of the Destroyer's army. They had been pitched within sight of the road and climbed the tall hill that bordered it. Upon the eastern slope of the hill, just shy of its crest, stood the command tent of the _strategos_. Rain pitter-pattered on its canvas. Gray skies hung above. But now that their _katalepsis_ had receded, Xena and every one of her clones felt something that couldn't be seen in the weather. It was subtle yet pervasive. From the north, somewhere up the Strymon River, came a feeling of warmth more penetrating and constant than that of Helios. _"Like a second sunrise..."_

_**May 15, 2006 – Seres, Macedonia**_

"Did you hear that?" A worried Gabrielle asked as she spooned up the last ravioli from her bowl. A faint thump had come to her ears. "It sounded like another explosion."

"Yes," a second Gabrielle agreed. They all heard pretty much the same things, camped in the open land southwest of Seres. The Strymon River flowed beside them and sounds traveled easily up the vale. "But I think it was more distant than the last one."

The first Gabrielle nodded nervously in agreement. They were all edgy. A disturbing sensation of impending trouble had been growing at an accelerating rate for over a week.

"I wonder if the people of Seres know anything about them?"

"They're all hiding inside their homes," another clone said as she walked up and sat down with a bowl of Spaghetti-Ohs. "They've been hiding for the last two days."

"Since we heard all those smaller explosions in the highlands to the south?"

"Yeah," the new arrival answered, "and they're convinced the army's coming back."

"Actually it sounds like they're moving away," the first Gabrielle noted. She squinted into the distance and added, "I'd guess there's a battle moving south down the river."

Over the next hour, the Gabrielles gathered on the riverbank, staring southeast towards Amphipolis and the sea. A faint breeze blew in their faces. The first faint shreds of clouds were forming overhead in whisps and tendrils that moved across the sky from the south. A sudden sharp thump came to them, both in the ground and through the air, a larger explosion from the battle. Subconsciously they took a step forward towards it.

And then their mouths opened in surprise and shock. They could feel the coldness of a soul-chilling power projected through the aether across an invisible link that no science could define. It rose in a cresting wave of malice, perpetrated by bloodlust and violent intent that were relics from the ancient world. A collective gasp rose from the gathered throng. 16,000 emerald green eyes were startled wide open. They had felt that chilling power before, but never in such an overwhelming measure, even when standing right next to Xena as it abated.

In a heartbeat that sensation crescendoed. The Gabrielles stood transfixed. Across the intervening miles they felt the aggregate aura of the _katalepsis_ of 8,000 Destroyers of Nations charging into battle. It sang to them, raw, overpowering, and feral, a joyous celebration of terror. In that moment the confirmation of the survival of their soulmates slammed into their midst. There could be no possible doubts any longer, no way to deny the truth. The feelings that assailed them were all too familiar from their original life. And yet, they had only felt that projection of menace on a handful of occasions. They had never felt it so strongly, for in ancient times, it had never existed en mass.

For fifteen minutes not a single clone moved. They were petrified, frozen in a place between their memories and these sensations. Their soulmates had unleashed the full measure of Ares' Blessing upon some hapless souls whose wretched fate had been to stand against them. Woe be unto the doomed. Beyond the swords or the chakrams, their soulmate's power lay in that rage and the strength of her will. Gabrielle had foreseen this five years before in the clearing behind the Pappas house as she stood preparing Eve's pyre. _Her soulmate's will was by far more powerful than even her sword arm, her tactics, or her physical strength. Seldom did such a will converge with such fury, and almost never when empowered by the blessing of a god._ The blondes could almost see that power flaring in Xena's eyes; their sky blue chilled to primal glacial ice, inhuman, merciless, and utterly terrifying. In spite of themselves, they cringed before the vision.

In the wake of the battle the efflorescence of the Destroyer's _katalepsis_ ebbed as the Xenas surveyed their defeated enemies. Their seething volcanic rage retreated to an uneasy simmering within the calderas of their souls. It would rest but not sleep, subdued for a time but not extinguished, awaiting the final battle.

Outside the city of Seres, the Gabrielles breathed again, their shoulders relaxed from the tetanous rigidity of their recent tension. The leaping conflagration to the southeast had progressed to a mature fire, with embers beneath and clean blue flames above. It was not the end, only a cessation for tactical advantage. A single Gabrielle took a single step forward onto the road.

"Are you crazy?" A more astute clone sharply hissed. "You'd have to be suicidal to get anywhere near them! She was bad enough when there was only one of her when she got like that. You felt it. There must be thousands of her, just like the Serites said, and now they've got Ares' Blessing. Do you want to end up on a cross and have her break your legs?"

The Gabrielle flinched at her sister's words. She turned her head and looked over, and the clone who had spoken so sharply saw the tears gathering in her eyes. Though she had somehow become more pragmatic during their journey, she still felt the same things as the rest. Her own feelings were tied in knots of heartbreak and foreboding.

"We can't go to her yet," she said much more softly, "we can't stop what has started now. She was never so far gone when we knew her, and if we're to have any chance at all, we'll have to be very careful and very fortunate, but most of all, we have to survive."

The first clone hung her head and slowly nodded as her tears overflowed. Like her sisters, she didn't fear death. She feared the separation of her soul from Xena's. When this life was finished, and it would certainly end one day, they would spend a time in the afterlife and then be reborn again. It had happened many times, for it was their destiny. And in each life, she had somehow met and kept her soulmate safe. In all those lives, Xena's soul had been ensconced in mortal bodies, without the influence of Ares' parentage or the threat of the _katalepsis_. She had never again slaughtered thousands. When each life had ended, they had found themselves together in the same place. They had been happy...together.

Now Xena was a Destroyer of Nations such as the world had never seen, even in her ancient life as the daughter of War. She was doing things that the original Destroyer of Nations had never done. Could Xena's deeds in this contrived lifetime turn the great judge against her? Would Hades separate their souls in the afterlife? And what would she become in the future she was creating when she took up her mortality again?

This was Gabrielle's fear. That the destiny promised by the Moirae long before a Xena or a Gabrielle had lived would be rescinded for eternity. Having known the sweetness of a soulmate, Gabrielle didn't think that she could survive again as a soul alone and watch Xena become a monster. Like many things, once tasted, there was no going back. Once shed, naivete could not be regained.

"We'll just have to wait," the pragmatic clone told the others, "the time to act will come." And then more softly still, as if to convince herself, "It has to...it's our destiny."

_**May 17, 2006 – The Camp of Athena's Army, Macedonia**_

"So who's the bigger loser?" A Callisto purred, taunting a pair of Mavicans. "The idiot who leads or the idiots who follow?"

"You followed her here too," a Mavican shouted back, "you're just as much of a fool as the rest of us."

"She led us here because I told her Xena was here," the Callisto responded with a self-satisfied smirk, "and you followed her just like you followed me all those years ago."

"So that only means we're stuck in this swamp because of you!" The second Mavican screamed.

"You've been trying to get us killed again so you can have the Xenas all to yourself," the first Mavican accused.

The Callisto cocked her head and savored the fantasy. All the Xenas to herself....

"What a lovely idea," she mused, before turning her attention back to the Mavicans. "Do you think you could get together with the others and maybe tire her out by getting yourselves killed so I could have some fun, the Xenas and I?"

_(Typical of the insane, the Callistos referred to themselves in the singular. It mirrored the more common phenomenon of a single lunatic referring to themself in the plural. Callisto, whether one or many, was supremely self-concerned, hence the "I".) Editor_

"I've got a better idea," an Elainis said as she walked up. "I think I'll tar you all and set you afire, then force you to run through her camp to burn down the tents. At least that way you'd have contributed something to our goddess' plan."

The Callisto and the Mavicans stared at her with undisguised resentment.

"Why don't the lot of you just shut up and act like part of an army? That's why she beat us, you know," the Elainis griped, "her warriors are united, body, heart, and soul."

"Oh, I'm sure they are," the Callisto cooed, "all with that same body. I wonder if they find themselves exciting, at night, in their tents? Or if they get bored? Maybe it's too much like touching themselves."

She drew a deep breath to quiet the intrinsic arousal accompanying the images that came into her mind. She could almost smell their scent. A field full of naked Xenas, touching and writhing as they stimulated each other. The Callistos had found that being cloned was an exciting variation on their past life. Callisto had never trusted anyone else enough to allow them to touch her, but now, unlimited numbers of herself were accessible and willing. They were all the same, with the same desires and needs. It had become a surprisingly enjoyable addiction, especially when they ganged up and held her down. She shook her head to clear it. The Elainis was saying something.

"...will be appearing to her army tonight. She is not pleased with the way things have been going, I can tell you that. She may demand sacrifices."

At 2130 hours, as the army huddled in the darkness around smoldering fires of barely dry wood, a golden light flared in their midst. Into the wretched encampment the Goddess of Wisdom materialized with flashes and sparkles that rained down upon the soggy earth. Around her clones slowly rose to their feet with an utter lack of enthusiasm. Of the lot, only the Elainises began to move forward and gather around her.

The immortal turned in a slow circle, surveying the dismal conditions of the camp and the demoralized warriors. She had seen what had transpired, but it shocked her to actually experience their setting through her physical presence. Yet she had visited defeated armies many times before, and though it was disappointing now, it wasn't unfamiliar. But these other shocks...what more was Xena capable of? Still, as in the past, she would do what she had come to do. She would rally the troops. The war wasn't over, and though none of these warriors would believe it now, victory was still possible. They just couldn't achieve it with their present divisive attitudes and defeatist outlook. She couldn't let them go to war like this again.

Athena would do her best to inspire her troops. The only problem was that she couldn't tell them everything she knew. The things she had seen, was still seeing...incredible! But to report on them would be to violate the strictures on directly joining the combat. It would escalate the war, for it would no longer be a war by proxy if she acted as a spy. That would be active participation. To reveal all that she had observed would be the same as wielding a sword herself and she knew that her brother would follow. And Xena was provoking her to do just that! Athena understood how dearly Ares desired to join his Favorite in battle. She couldn't allow that to happen.

Ilios had been a mess as she remembered, with so many of the Olympians adulterating the development of the mortal's battle with their presence. From the start it had been a miasma of conflicting strategies, alliances, and obligations...totally unacceptable.

Today the Goddess of Wisdom would restrict herself to inspiring her clones and sharing a possible strategy. She could not afford to share intelligence that had been gathered with her godly powers of observation and draw her brother into the combat. He had become unpredictable.

Ares was different now than he had once been. It was one of the first things she had noticed about him in the modern world. Maybe it had been his long sleep in the tomb. Maybe it had been his maturing over the last 2,000 years. She really didn't know. Somehow he had become cagier, less given to rampant and reckless reactions. He hadn't taken the bait as she'd taunted him in the aether after they'd both rescued their Favorites from the Temple of the Chakram. Xena was different too. The Warrior Princess' rage was greater than it had ever been in the ancient world. In a way, it seemed as if their changes had balanced out, leaving them both more deadly.

Athena thought of Xena's performance thus far. It was nothing short of exemplary. From the very moment the Warrior Princess had apprehended the nature of her enemy, she had proceeded on a planned course and brilliantly executed every step. She had forged an army of astonishing capabilities that the Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare would have been proud to call her own. The once "Hellene's Bane" had waged her war with perilous cunning and merciless precision. She had nullified most of Athena's technological advantages, destroyed her power base, and turned the world into a wasteland barely worth fighting over. And she had done it without the direct aid of her patron god.

Oh, Athena knew that Xena had called for Ares' Blessing and that her brother had granted it. That had always been a given for as long as gods had chosen mortal Favorites. Athena would do the same for Elainis and her army, but therein lay a difference. Xena had been born a commoner and had risen to her station, fighting tooth and nail for every step up the ladder of command. She accepted her father's patronage when it suited her purposes. Elainis had been born a princess and had never deigned to ask for anyone's aid. Her royal pride forbade it, even where her goddess was concerned. She was loyal and deadly and had been born to command, but she wasn't as well suited to lead. She certainly wouldn't stoop to sacrificing a goat.

The Goddess of Wisdom had cloned her warriors for the strengths each offered, not the least of which was their ability to torment Ares' Favorite by their very existance. But Athena had miscalculated the human personality factors that had become their weakness. She had envisioned the four groups of clones collaborating and burying Xena's forces with their superior numbers. The binding tie between them was her own presence as their goddess and creator. They should have been able to decide among themselves how to prosecute a winning campaign, especially against a foe limited to only one point of view. The tools were there, the raw materials in place...and yet, they had become fractious. And here, Athena belatedly realized another miscalculation.

She had cloned over 15,000 Elainises simultaneously. None of them was a primary clone; none of them was more highly placed or favored than her sisters. They were equals in every way. They worked together well enough, but grated against the others. And none of them was a _strategos hypatos_. Her army had no clear chain of command.

Her brother had always told her that an army could have only one general. She hadn't believed him. It had started when her patron city of Athens had instituted democracy as its form of government and become a power in ancient Hellas. It had been reinforced with the passing centuries, as teamwork, allegiances, confederations, and joint service command staffs had become the order of the world's military forces. It had even worked in a country where the supreme leader had been a civilian, elected for a finite term, and constrained by his congress for their funding and declaration of war. It had been her biggest success, and now it lay in ruins. Had the millennia proved her wrong? She still couldn't believe it.

Athena granted herself a moment of whimsy. Would that Elainis had been her daughter, not the granddaughter of Zeus. Would that her later Favorite, Gaius Julius Caesar, had lived to lead the empire he'd created. The world would have been hers two millennia ago, but Ares had discerned her intentions and opposed her by impregnating a Thracian innkeeper. Three years after the birth of Caesar, a man born and fated to be ruled by the destiny she offered, Ares' daughter had been born to thwart him.

Athena had helped Caesar all she could in fighting his war against Ares' Favorite, the Warrior Princess. Her Favor had augmented his own native cunning. In the end it had not been enough. He had failed to crush her despite having the resources of the west's greatest state at his command, and Athena had fallen to temptation. On that fateful day in March of 44 BC, she had cheated. She had helped the ungrateful Callisto triumph over Xena and Gabrielle in that alley behind her brother's temple. The Chakram of Night...her invisible hand had guided its course. But some other force had touched the ring. It had not buried itself in Xena's back as it should have. Instead, it had broken, leaving the Warrior Princess helpless but still alive. There had been one last chance inherent in that outcome, but the goddess had declined it.

Ares had been furious at her direct intervention, but with Zeus' sanction he had offered her a trade. Cure and free Xena and Gabrielle, and destroy Callisto. When it was done, his daughter would retire to spend her remaining years as a mother and teacher to Eve and Hope. In pride she had refused, and in restitution Ares had acted with their father's blessing. Gaius Julius Caesar had died at the hands of the senate as the soulmates hung on their crosses.

Athena had renewed their war by proxy, attacking Ares' Favorite in the modern world. Now the goddess wondered if she hadn't made a strategic error. She had sent a Callisto into combat against Gabrielle at the tournament in San Francisco. Unexpectedly, the bard had defeated her. She had sent more clones to attack their school. And afterwards, the battle had escalated. Now Xena held the Chakram of Day and if Athena intervened directly, Ares would act again. Xena would render to her father the god killing ring, and he would use the weapon against his sister. Their shared blood would never stay his hand when balanced against attaining his goal of ensuring the supremacy of his way. Their father was long gone. There was no one left who could stop him. After 3,500 years, their sibling rivalry would reach its conclusion. It was a horrifying prospect. Athena shook it from her mind and thought of a greater mystery that had troubled her far more deeply.

Why had the soulmates reappeared? They had been cloned by Alti; she knew that, but why now? Why had they appeared just as her long plan had been coming to fruition? The timing was astonishing. 2,000 years ago Xena and Gabrielle had been instrumental in foiling her plans for Rome, but they had all been part of a chapter buried in history. Now they had reappeared. Athena had begun cloning her champions when she'd discovered Xena and Gabrielle's existance. At first it had looked like the work of her recently freed brother, taking up their sibling war again. She could only answer his actions with her own. And so their war had resumed.

But Ares couldn't travel time as she could. The original material to be cloned hadn't come from Xena and Gabrielle. It had come from their descendants, Janice Covington and Melinda Pappas...their _identical_ descendants, 109 and 105 generations later. What were the chances of that? Almost nil. Unless...and Athena had pondered this question ceaselessly. _Fate_. Fate alone could account for the unfurling of a series of events so unlikely as to be impossible. The explanation left her chilled. Everyone had believed that not even the gods could change fate and only the Moirae knew what outcome it held. After 3,500 years she could very easily lose everything because she had never been meant to win.

Athena roused herself from her thoughts and prepared to address the gathered clones. They had been looking at her expectantly and her lengthy hesitation had unnerved them. Now they were fidgeting, their eyes darting, and their bodies tensing. Their minds would be tensing as well, she thought, ever less open to considering the words she intended to speak. That, she couldn't afford.

"Warriors," she began, choosing the word to remind them of their identity, "you have suffered a temporary setback, yes, but this is far from a final defeat. This war is not nearly over, and though you have sustained losses, victory is still within your grasp."

She surveyed the clones and saw that she had become their sole focus. They were listening to her with their undivided attention. It was a good start.

"Your enemy has shown great skills in vicious fighting, but hear me! She has but one mind. It is her strength and her weakness. Her army was bred only to obey. This army was created with options, with the possibility of pooling the resources of four great fighters. You have the potential, the abilities, and the numbers to destroy your enemy. You can do this, but to do it you must have the will to conquer.

Each of you has different reasons to fight. Each of you was included for the different skills you achieved in your original lives. And each of you must gain from the others to make your differences a benefit, not a liability. You must work together as an army to conquer, or you will fail together as defeated individuals.

I don't need to tell you that another defeat will mean your end. Xena has declined to finish you off at present because to pursue a much larger force into such disadvantageous terrain would be suicidal. She knows this. She chased you here but broke off her pursuit when she had backed you into this swamp. With nowhere left to run, you'd have been forced to turn and fight. She opted to avoid that confrontation, hoping that more favorable options would appear. But by waiting, Xena has ceded the chance to act first."

Give them a hint of hope, Athena thought. Around her she saw that the clones' eyes had brightened as they accepted her observations of their battle. They stood a little straighter and moved forward towards her. They hung on her words with expectation.

"So now you understand, it is up to you to take the battle to her. You will choose the time of the next conflict by marching out of this swamp and onto a field of battle. On the cleared field, it has always been numerical superiority that has conferred the advantage. The disparity is even more favorable because you have cavalry. Though Xena knows this as well, she has only her existing troops to work with. She has fewer choices.

I can tell you that her fondest dream would be to destroy you piecemeal, cadre by cadre, for then, she would have evened her odds. You must not allow that to happen! From seeing the battle today, I can tell you that facing her one on one will bring certain defeat. Her clones have a rage, a bloodlust that can only have come from Ares' Blessing. She claimed as much in her challenge at the end of April."

Athena thought of the message conveyed by the blinded Elainis. _"With the Blessing of Ares, the true God of War, I will destroy your army and kill your goddess."_ A death threat from a mortal! She had very nearly choked when she'd heard it. Then she'd remembered the Chakram of Day and the threat had become real. It was not hubris.

"I offer my Blessing to this army at the request of my Favorite," Athena announced. The Elainises stared at her but remained silent. Not a one of them will ask for my help, she thought sadly, or perhaps none of them feel it's their place to be the one to ask before the others. "Only one of you needs to speak for you all. It is the only direct aid I can give you without involving other gods in this war."

The Elainises looked at each other, all of them deferring to the next. Not a leader among them, the goddess thought sadly. She sighed. I cannot confer my Blessing upon a Chosen unasked, no Olympian can anymore. She looked around at the clones of her Favorite, each indecisively remaining silent. The seconds stretched out. No one spoke.

"Very well," she finally said. "You already have the potential to defeat Xena and her army, even without my Blessing. The necessity is for you to decide how best to utilize your advantages as a group, to attack with a cohesive battle plan, and to choose the time of engagement that's most beneficial for you. Stack the deck in your favor in any way you can. Your survival is at stake, but beyond that, the way mankind will wage war will be determined. The victor will decide whether the world will cleave to Ares' way or to mine. Your victory or defeat will cast the ballot for either civilization or barbarism."

The clones stood spellbound, hanging on her every word.

"Xena's army is equipped as _euzonos_, and light infantry can be beaten on a field of battle by cavalry and more heavily armed troops. You have the numbers to outflank her forces. You have the mobility to cut off her movements. And among you there is the ability to organize a better battle strategy than a single commander can formulate. All these advantages are yours. Combined with the will to conquer, you will be victorious."

Some of the clones actually cheered. Morale was improving, Athena noted.

"If you fight with all your abilities and all your numbers wholly committed, you will take the field," Athena told them seriously. "The Xenas number only a third of your count. Can one in three of you slay an enemy?" She asked, her voice rising. "That is all it would take to wipe them out utterly. Yet even that isn't necessary. I say, if just one in five of you can slay an enemy you shall prevail. Surely the greatest warriors of two ages can manage such an outcome against a mob of Thracian peasants?"

Athena had shouted the last question, playing to her audience, and when she finished there was a moment of silence. Then the clones around her erupted, cheering and stamping their feet. Now they believed victory was possible. They began chanting, led by the Elainises, and they were chanting her name.

The goddess was sure that the Warrior Princess could hear their voices in her camp, but Xena would know what had transpired in much more detail than just by rumor. From the first moment of her arrival, the Goddess of Wisdom had noted the presence of spies. Several of the Xenas walked among her clones, carefully staying away from the fires and avoiding any touches. They froze when looked at even though they were as invisible as _daemons_, and she realized that it was to still the shifting of their shadows, the creation of footprints, and the swirling of smoke. None of them were carrying visible weapons. They stared at her with undisguised hatred and listened to every word she said, and she could do nothing about them. It was one of the worst experiences of her immortal life, being monitored and censured by her mortal enemies, lest she somehow give Ares an excuse to become directly involved. She fled in a flash of golden light at the first possible opportunity.

_**May 17, 2006 – The Camp of the Destroyer of Nations, Macedonia**_

"_Strategos_, Athena appeared to her army. She offered them inspiration but divulged no secrets," a _kataskopos_ reported at the _synedrion_ Xena had called after hearing the eruption of cheering from the enemy camp.

The Destroyer of Nations allowed herself a grin. With her godly vision, Athena must have noted the presence of her spies, and yet she had said nothing. For a moment, Xena wished she had been there herself. She would have walked up in front of the whole enemy army and slit Athena's throat with the Chakram of Day.

"She fears her brother joinin' the battle so badly that she'll send her troops to their deaths rather than tell 'em our capabilities," she told her gathered_praipositoi_. "We've hobbled the goddess as surely as we've cowed her army."

"Can you tell us more about what was said?" Prima asked the scout.

"She spoke of our past battle tactics, speculated on our present and future actions, and exhorted her troops to work together. She assured them that victory was possible and then listed all of their shortcomings as advantages. In the end, she spoke mostly as a politician would to dullards."

Xena chuckled at the spy's synopsis.

"You're certain that this was the Goddess of Wisdom?" Secunda asked.

"Only because she was received so by her troops," the _kataskopos_ admitted.

"Continue to keep an eye on the camp," Xena told her with a nod. "The rains will continue for a total of seven days. During that time the enemy will not attack, but we must prepare the battlefield for them," Xena told the group.

She spoke to a _chiliarchos_ next. "Place a line of sentries along the fields to the enemy's southeast. That field must be rendered impermeable to cavalry and inhospitable to infantry. Both will try to attack our left flank there, but the cavalry's more worrisome. The less they see of our preparations, the better. Between the rain an' the sentries their observations should be minimal. Use as many troops as necessary to finish in two days.

Our enemy will arm for war on the 22nd, and that day will dawn sunny. On that day we will destroy them. It has been foreseen," Xena said as she surveyed her officers. Each of them acknowledged her words with a subtle nod. Each of her past predictions had been completely accurate. "In the battle's wake, Athena will appear, and when she does, she is doomed. This I see only in my mind's eye, yet it too shall be. I'll speak with each of you in the next few days regardin' the parts you'll play to achieve this final goal. There's no doubt in my mind that we'll succeed. Athena's scared, but she'll always have her pride."

Xena dismissed the _synedrion_. For a long time afterwards, she spoke with Prima and Secunda. In her encampment, troops were chosen to work in shifts, preparing the battlefield and guarding the workers. In Athena's camp, spies blended in among the shadows. The night drew on. The rain fell. Though the enemy didn't yet know it, they would decide to attack the morning the weather cleared, and that day would be the 22nd, just as the _strategos_ had foreseen. Destiny was moving faster now, driving events forward towards a conclusion that was 2,000 years and more in the making. Neither gods nor mortals were immune. All had their parts to play, and only the Fates knew what was to unfold.

When she was finally alone, Xena let her thoughts wander. Of the battle she had no doubts. Her army would annihilate the enemy. The uncertainties of this war lay not in the combat, but in those factors she couldn't control, the Gabrielles and the gods.

In their original lives, Gabrielle had been wont to appear at inopportune times on occasion, and Xena suspected that one of those times was due. She only hoped that the blonde clones wouldn't suddenly march into the battle. It would be a disaster, upsetting her warriors' focus and providing their enemy with potential hostages. The Destroyer of Nations wanted the battle to be swift, and therefore decisive and safer for her troops, a clean kill. She recalled the words of the God of War, _"They all live for you."_

It had sounded like a reference to her own clones, but Xena had rejected that because of the context. They had been commenting on the uncertainty she felt. She had suspected that Ares might actually mean the Gabrielles. The more she thought about it now, the more convinced she became. Why would he state the obvious about her troops while discussing unknowns? Had he been giving her a reassurance about the cloned army that had disappeared and still remained undiscovered? Xena would breath much easier if she could accept that the Gabrielles weren't her enemies. Then she added the fact that originally Ares had broached the topic himself. _"Yet one factor troubles you."_

He knows something! She felt the truth of her realization with the gut certainty that had served her so well in the past. There was more that he hasn't or couldn't share. She sat straighter in her chair, riveted by the revelation. Direct intervention! He cannot act without freeing Athena to act too. He cannot share what he knows or has seen without being a spy! The Gabrielles are not my enemies! And Gabrielle knows war. She will not jeopardize the battle. Xena let out a long breath of relief.

Forewarned is forearmed, she thought, and now I know I won't have to order my army to fight my soulmate...their soulmates. Even she would have shied from ordering the slaughter of the Gabrielles, for she'd suspected that her army might have balked at that command, whether they were the enemy or no.

A scratching at her tent flap alerted her to the presence of someone requesting entrance.

"Enter," she ordered.

The tent flap drew aside to reveal the _praipositos_ of the detail she'd dispatched over a month before. And not a moment too soon, Xena thought. The clone bore a bundle, a bulging US Navy medic's bag. She walked in and set it on her general's table.

"We have completed our mission,_ Strategos_," she stated.

"Report," Xena coaxed, trying to squelch her anticipation.

"We traveled by night to within 35 miles and then by night cloaked. We detonated no charges for fear of drawing attention, though the area is remote. The entrance was deeply buried and we excavated it only at night, covering and camouflaging our work by day. It took weeks to gain entrance. We entered and explored, losing two to traps. On the third day we located the objective. It took two more days to claim the weapon. We buried the dead in the tomb and used one of their uniforms to cloak the weapon during our return. I have just arrived. The mission was completed as ordered."

"Excellent," Xena said, "now eat and get some rest. We're on the verge of battle and I'll need to brief ya' further. You've succeeded just in time."

When the clone had gone, Xena opened the bag and stared at the object inside. The weapon was just as it had been described. Now, coupled with the revelation of Ares' comments, she could breath freely with the assurance that her uncertainties had been addressed. Returning to her native land had not been whim, it had been a strategic necessity. In war, there was no substitute for being prepared.

_**May 20, 2006 – Seres, Macedonia**_

"I don't think I can stand this any longer," a miserable Gabrielle complained as she reclaimed her seat under a lean-to beside an Amazon hunter's fire. A pair of logs burned cleanly in a narrow rock-lined pit at her feet. Over its long rectangular opening, a grating supported a cook pot and a teakettle. It was a typical wet season camp.

The slow, steady rain had started the evening of the battle and it hadn't stopped since. After five days and nights, almost everything was soaked. It was remarkably abnormal weather. In response, the Gabrielles had built a thousand campsites, each with a small lean-to packed with dry wood and foods, a shallow pit-fire, and a larger lean-to facing it for shelter. They huddled in parties of eight, watching the endless gray skies and the falling droplets as their world became soaked. At least they didn't lack drinking water.

They'd long ago exhausted their topics of conversation. Since they all knew everything the others knew, there wasn't much room for personal revelations. They'd written down all their past impressions, and diary entries of, "today it rained", had gotten tiresome. It was the boredom, the waiting, and the inability to act that was weighing on their spirits.

"I'm going to make a cup of tea," another Gabrielle announced as she stood and moved toward the fire with her cup, "does anyone else want some?"

"I've had so much tea that I can taste it in the back of my throat," the first grouched.

"I want a Pepsi," a third suddenly blurted out, then examined her words in surprise. She'd never tasted a Pepsi in this life. "Huh," she muttered.

"I wonder when this will stop," a fourth clone asked no one in particular. It had become a mantra of sorts and she didn't expect an answer.

"You and everyone else," a Gabrielle grumped from the back of the lean-to.

The muttered comments brought a sigh from a silent clone at one end of the lean-to. She despised their forced inactivity as much as the others, but she'd found something to do while she waited. Inspired by the same memories of the Amazons that had guided them all in building the campsites, she had begun crafting a fighting staff from a segment of a sapling's trunk that she'd found. She had stripped the bark, smoothed the shaft and slowly fire hardened the six-foot length. Now she was wrapping the ends with strands of a supple vine, as a substitute for the rawhide she didn't have. She'd noticed that she wasn't alone in this work. Perhaps one in six of them were fashioning some form of simple weapon, a staff, spear, chobos, or club. She hoped that maybe when the weather improved, they could do some sparring.

As she worked, she thought of the Destroyer, Athena, and their armies. Another battle was coming; she was sure of it. Since it hadn't already occurred, she could only suspect that the generals were waiting for the rain to end. Then they would fight.

This Gabrielle had thought and wondered and thought some more. How would they approach their crazed soulmate without getting themselves crucified? It wouldn't happen before the battle, she was fairly sure of that. She knew Xena. The warrior was ever suspicious of surprises. The Gabrielle doubted that there could be anything more surprising than the appearance of 8,000 of herselves. Worse, she couldn't afford to distract her soulmate during a battle. She could cause her beloved warrior to lose the fight by breaking her clones' concentration at a crucial moment.

So they would have to wait until the battle was decided before appearing. Okay, she could live with that, so long as Xena's army won. She also knew that if Xena were losing when they saw her, every one of her sisters would throw themselves into the battle even if they had to use their teeth as weapons. She tied off the vine at the end of her staff.

She and the others had discussed the topic until it was as tired as a dead horse. They had conjectured and supposed and considered all the details they knew or suspected. Their consensus was that Xena had based her army in Amphipolis. Athena's army had approached from Chalcidice. There had been fighting in the highlands and explosions down the road. A horrifying battle had been fought and won by the Destroyer of Nations. Now the greatest likelihood was that Athena's army was stalled, camped somewhere between Amphipolis and Seres. The enemy lay between them.

The topic of scouting downstream had been broached and rejected. None thought it wise to send unarmed scouts into a battle zone, especially when they suspected the first clones they'd run into would be hostile. They'd decided to stay put and then move when the rain stopped. They'd try to keep out of sight and appear to Xena's army after their victory over Athena. Maybe then, they'd have a chance to live long enough to talk with their soulmate. Maybe there would be a chance of getting her back to "normal".

_**May 21, 2006 – The Camp of the Destroyer of Nations, Macedonia**_

Xena stood up behind her desk and solemnly addressed the evening _synedrion_. Her tent was silent as the _praipositoi_ waited to hear her words. Raindrops tapped on the canvas overhead, but the _strategos_ had predicted fair weather and every one of them believed.

"This is the seventh night of rain," she began, "and I have foreseen a clear dawn to follow. In the morning's light Athena's army will move to attack. With the rumor of Eos we will await them. On the hilltop our troops will gather in a battle line matching theirs. The cliffs guard our right flank, your preparations in the field, our left. The battle will be simple, fought only on the plain. There we will fall upon our enemies at Apollo's rising. We will spill their blood under his chariot's first charge up the sky, and by the zenith we will have our victory. On this day, Apollo's Blessing too will be ours.

You all know the plan. Your troops know every tactic and the orders to signal them. It is simple. There is only one goal. Kill 'em all. They have no place left in this world. As Apollo's chariot rides down the sky, the world's nations will kneel to a new order...our order, which is Ares' Way. Nike will proclaim our victory.

Athena will fall. This is fated. It is our destiny to change the world. We cannot fail. I have discerned the hand of the Moirae blessing this army with victory. Somehow we are doing their work, though to what end, only they can tell. But that is not our concern. We are warriors. Phobos, Deimos, and Nemesis are our allies. Ares has given his Blessing. We will soak this land with their blood.

When the last enemy has fallen and we alone stand upon the field, the Goddess of Wisdom will come to meet her doom. She will be crazed in her defeat and ruled by a loser's pride. It will be her downfall. When her ichor joins the blood of her army to stain this land, our victory will be complete.

You all know what to do. No other army could have achieved what you already have. No other army could gain the victory that will be ours tomorrow. Await the morning. In its light we will truly live, but through the battle's glory we will live forever."

There was no cheering, no stamping, no applause. Xena herself was deadly serious. Her voice had never risen, and though she was surprised at her own eloquence, she had spoken no lie. Her absolute confidence was not hubris or self-deception. She had foreseen victory and had labored long over her plan to implement it.

The hard part was done. Mithridates had taught her this. _A great leader may triumph with mediocre warriors, but the best warriors without a leader will fall. Wars are not won with the sword alone. They are won with the mind. Only when the cunning mind leads can the strong hand follow to gain victory. Hands without minds are corpses._ At the age of 17 she had led ignorant farmers to defeat a warlord. And now, the hands were the most skilled in this mortal world, guided by the preeminent strategist of their generation, and blessed by their patron god and the Fates. The execution of their plan had become almost a formality.

She looked at her officers, meeting their eyes one by one with a nod that conveyed her own blessing. When she met Prima's eyes they exchanged a private look.

_And when we meet_

_As I'm sure we will_

_All that was then_

_Will be there still_

_(Partial lyric from, _"White Flag"_, Dido)_

_**May 22, 2006 – Seres, Macedonia**_

There were few things a Gabrielle hated worse than being shaken awake. All through their camp, Gabrielles shook other Gabrielles awake and then did their best to mollify their anger, biting comments, and sleepy, withering looks. From every lean-to, groans and protests could be heard as clones reluctantly rose. It was 2:45 am and the watch had reported that the rain had stopped and the clouds were breaking up. Already they could see a few stars through the rents in the overcast. It had been a week since anything had been seen above them but rain.

The Gabrielles grumbled into their boots, those who had weapons hefted them, and the throng set off down the road. They left everything else behind. Either they could retrieve their things later, or it wouldn't matter anymore.

They walked briskly to waken themselves more fully, but they maintained a stealth that had long been second nature. No one spoke. They staggered their footsteps instead of creating an audible beat by marching. On the paved road, it was easier than in the Amazon forest. For a group of 8,000, they made surprisingly little noise...less than three teens going to a party. As their strides ate up the miles, they saw and heard no one. The road and the lands around it were unsurprisingly deserted. It was a war zone. Except for the wariness of those in the lead, the rest were searching their memories for recollections about the lay of the land in the Strymon Vale.

**Continued in Chapter 11**

65


	11. Clonefic Part 3 Chapter 11

Clonefic

Part 3 Chapter 11

By Phantom Bard

**For Disclaimer**: See Part 3 Chapter 1

_There's no time for us_

_There's no place for us_

_What is this thing that builds our dreams yet slips away_

_From us_

_Who wants to live forever_

_Who wants to live forever....?_

_There's no chance for us_

_It's all decided for us_

_This world has only one sweet moment set aside for us_

_Who wants to live forever_

_Who wants to live forever?_

_Who dares to love forever?_

_When love must die_

_But touch my tears with your lips_

_Touch my world with your fingertips_

_And we can have forever_

_And we can love forever_

_Forever is our today_

_Who wants to live forever_

_Who wants to live forever?_

_Forever is our today_

_Who waits forever anyway?_

_(Lyric from, _"Who Wants To Live Forever"_, Written by Brian May, Recorded by Queen)_

_**May 22, 2006 – The Strymon Vale, Macedonia**_

"_Strategos_, the enemy moves," the spy reported. "They are forming ranks and arming."

It was 0430 hours, still dark, but the rain had ceased two hours before and the overcast had finally broken up. It was just as Xena had predicted, and throughout her camp, every clone believed.

"Pass the word," the Destroyer of Nations ordered, "everyone is to eat and then ready themselves silently. We stand formation at 0530 hours."

The _kataskopos_ nodded and left the tent to convey the orders. For several moments, Xena stood in the doorway and watched the rousing of her camp. The message was passed. Tents emptied. Clones emerged to check the sky and then move to the mess area. Despite the activity, there was almost no sound. The _strategos_ nodded in approval and then turned back to reenter her tent.

Within the darkness she walked directly to her pallet. In the darkness she began to dress, donning uniform, armor, and boots. She armed herself, sword, dagger, and Combined Chakram. Still in the darkness she turned to the tent's other occupant, her night vision providing her with a nearly perfect mirror image of herself.

"Are you ready?" She asked.

"Yes, _Strategos_," the clone answered. She hesitated for a moment and then added, "I feel them coming down the road from the northwest."

Xena regarded the words for a moment. Whose presence had those hyper-sharp senses revealed? Not the enemy this time, but not an ally either. Then she realized who it must be in all their thousands. _"They all live for you."_ She filed the information away.

"May this day bring you glory," Xena said as she turned to leave.

"Victory or death," came the answer.

At 0530 hours the army of the Destroyer of Nations gathered in battle formation on the hill's crest. They stood silently, in two ranks of 4,000 files width, their faces attentive but betraying no nervousness. The two "specials" had occupied positions 1,000 and 3,000 in the front rank. Now the clones watched as their supreme commander walked from the command tent and stood on the hilltop facing them. They focused their attention on her as she reviewed them before scanning the battlefield.

The _strategos _turned in a slow circle, confirming the conditions the morning's light would soon reveal. Overhead, the last broken lumps of cloud limped across the sky, ghostly pale with a waning moon setting and the morning star overhead. Gentle light illuminated the ground fog and laid the field before her under a glowing mist that stretched out to cover the swamp. It obscured the enemy camp and hid the Strymon River. Almost, she could imagine it as a haze of lost years, into whose nebulosity had passed all the battles she had known through her memories of another life. Into that haze flowed each passing moment as her present life slipped into history too. There was continuity here, even for a clone. Everything was in place, all her weapons ready, all her strategies set. She was at peace; more so than at any other time since she had awoken and escaped the lab.

Slowly she let her focus slide to the northwest, allowing her finely tuned senses to open and receive the sensations that emanated from that direction. She remembered first feeling it 60º off the Miss Artiphys' starboard beam while skimming along the coast of Tanzania, and how unerringly it had drawn her attention. Yes, she thought, it was _"Like a second sunrise..."_. Somehow the memory of that day brought her comfort. After a moment, she shifted her focus back to the battlefield. With her army, she waited.

Her army! The realization of command came to her, conveying the importance of her responsibilities. She stood at the nexus of history, fate, and destiny. She knew her part. She and all the others had been created for this day, this deed. She perceived the hands of the Moirae weaving the fabric of all lives in fate's warp and weft, and she understood that this was the source of the absolute certainty she felt about the near future. It was exhilarating, and paradoxically, like the sensation projected from the Gabrielles, it too brought her peace.

The first gentle breath of air movement caressed her face as the mass of atmosphere above her took on energy. Somewhere far to the east, perhaps gracing the steppes she'd once ravaged, Helios warmed the land. Above that sere and endless grass heated air rose, while at ground level, cool air was drawn in to replace it. Apollo's fiery disc drove the engine of the wind, reduced at its very margins to the gentlest of breezes as Eos suckled at the waning chill of night. She slowly inhaled and exhaled. With her army, she waited.

Here time seemed frozen, yet she knew it moved forward, heartbeat by heartbeat, unstoppable. Afterwards, she would never be able to pinpoint the moment at which she seemed to be living the prophecy; the moment at which she stepped from her mortal life and into myth. In that moment, she became hyperaware. She had been given great gifts and Ares' Blessing. Never before had one such as her lived, and now as every sense sharpened, she felt as if she had never lived before. The serenity of the previous moment was replaced by an almost supernatural focus. With that focus she saw action and consequence, history and present, fate and future. She saw strategies and tactics, capabilities and limits, possibilities presented and certainties created. She saw with the clarity of a _strategos hypatos_ and a god's mortal Favorite. Time continued to flow.

Anthracite hair shifted in the slight breeze, while eyes as heartless as chips of flint cut through the predawn stillness where the coming morning's moisture thickened the air and offered the land a carpet of dew. Selene's disc had set and Phosphor's star was fading. As promised in Ares' vision years before, the weeklong overcast had broken up in the last candlemarks. The dawn would be clear. She waited, mantled in the stillness of discipline, for prescience was upon her. She lived within the truth of the vision. Nations had fallen and half a world lay in flaming rubble. The survivors would enter a second Dark Age in servitude to the Conqueror, their machinery silenced. Yet true silence could no more exist here than could the darkness of true night. It was too late for either now. In moments Eos would taint the horizon behind her, heralding Apollo's light as a clarion of battle. It would be a lovely day for a bloodbath.

Before her a narrow plain lay under the failing darkness, cleared and groomed as a field of battle. Facing her across that scant eighth mile of land, a hostile army of 24,000 soldiers waited. These enemies had been bred, armed, and inspired by a leader of inhuman ability, and yet they had already been driven to their present disadvantageous position, encamped on the soggy margins of a swamp and facing uphill against her from the west. Xena had left them to steep in that demoralizing environment for the past week.

With supremely acute hearing she marked the faint rush of air as it flowed in and out of their lungs. It was an ocean of rhythmic whispers, like waves lapping against distant shores, or the even more distant impressions, fainter to her mind than memories from another life, of her mother's breath while she'd still rested in her womb. Over the intervening furlong, the slightest of breezes conveyed a fractional degree's warmth from their collective body heat to caress her skin, almost as an offering of their mortality. They were so close.

A glance to her right revealed a sheer cliff face rising four hundred feet in an imposing verticality of schist and gneiss, a magmatic darkness recalling its origin in Hades' realm. Born of earth's fire, the black rock was a fitting ally, a lithic equivalent of her unbending will and enduring darkness. Now its igneous hardness reflected sounds to her ears, and later it would simplify the battle. No troop movements would come from the right flank today, and there would be no escape up that escarpment for the vanquished.

From somewhere on her left came the shuffling of many hooves, horses softly chuffing, an occasional snort, and the scents of harness leather, the animals, and their dung. She marked them clearly in her mind's eye; _hippikon_, cavalry...perhaps 2,000 waiting to crash against her left flank. With the foresight of a veteran general, she visualized the rear ranks of her enemies marching to follow the cavalry charge after the infantry lines engaged, hoping to mop up her shattered files. A good plan, she mused, but futile.

The fallow field they would trample during their attack lay crisscrossed with thorn vines and netting and undermined by camouflaged trenches filled with wicked spikes whose points were poisoned with botanic toxins. There were wobble-boards, trip lines, trap doors, and loose river stones to turn an ankle. Body-swallowing potholes gave the appearance of puddles, but hid half-length spears just beneath their surface. More visible were the inclined stakes with their bases embedded deep in the turf, their shafts angled forward to impale a horse or funnel the riders into the other traps. No troop movements would come from the left flank today, and the vanquished there would be reduced to broken bodies and rent flesh.

The enemy outnumbered her forces by over three to one. They were far too numerous for stealth, yet far too few for victory. Already over twice their number lay dead and her army had collected the weapons from their recently fallen to arm her traps. In a forgotten world, the living would have comprised four Imperial Legions, complete with cavalry wings. No one could hide an army of that size in such a small space. No one could prevail against her fielding a conventional army within an order of magnitude of her own army's count.

Those soldiers across the plain were just doomed soldiers who waited to fight and die as Apollo's chariot rode up into the sky. With a soul as cold as her pale blue eyes, she had no mercy to offer them. They had been bred to fight and they would be slaughtered to the last, exterminated utterly, leaving not even a memory worthy of tales or song. On this day their mortal souls would be rendered unto Hades' judgment, and their immortal general would die at her hand. For a moment she wondered how a god would judge a god, and the thought brought a slight curl to her lips.

Now she turned and cast her gaze back upon her own army. There stood almost 8,000 warriors at parade rest, with hands clasped behind their backs and their feet set shoulder width apart. Their formation was 4,000 across to match the enemy's line, but only two ranks deep against the enemy's six. For this engagement they were equipped as _euzonos_, light infantry, each clad head to toe in black body armor woven of manmade spider silk and overlain with cyber-mimetic fabric. On their left collars, the Sigil of War was emblazoned in blood red; on their right shoulders, the Lion of Amphipolis was embroidered in gold. Alone among them, her own right collar bore the silver ring of the chakram.

In all the history of armed conflict, never had any general fielded an army so cohesive, so committed, or so deadly. Xena knew every fighter as intimately as she knew herself; she knew their abilities, their courage, and the uncompromising perfection of their training. Menace projected from them like a storm front, these fell and peerless fighters. They held every edge their general could give them save numbers, and today that would count for nothing, for they had the advantages of heredity, technology, and destiny.

In contrast to the army across the plain, her army was deathly silent. They stood frozen, bodies that metabolized at 42% greater than an average mortal barely breathing, without any nervous movements or even the slightest evidence of any diminution of their focus. These warriors mirrored their commander in every aspect. Each cast her cold eyes on their opposition, identical neutral expressions on their faces, and each stood as tall as the next. With such an army in the time of her original life, she would have subjugated Hellas in a month and taken all of the Roman Empire in five.

Xena stood watching. She was more than a _strategos hypatos_, a supreme commander, to them. She was the mother of them all. Behind her back, a finger absentmindedly stroked the patch on her arm where the cells had been harvested less than five years before. She had forged this army with the Blessing of her patron god, and with it she would conquer on this day...and on every day to come. She would defeat the immortal enemy leader and her army before Apollo reached the zenith. She would put an end to the rapaciousness of Science. Finally, after all the intervening years, she would change the world. It had been foreseen and she believed.

Before the _strategos_ a tall figure flashed into existence and gave her an unabashed look of approval. His Favorite. He leaned in and gave her a quick kiss on the lips, symbolic of his Blessing, and then he vanished in a flash of blue light. In his wake she fingered the razor sharp ring at her waist...the Chakram of Day...the only unbroken, uncombined chakram left in existence. It was as deadly now as it had been on that long forgotten morning when Hephaestos had first forged it. It was as deadly to a goddess as to a titan.

At last the long awaited dawn broke the horizon. She saw the _ektaxis_ of the enemy, drawn up 4,000 across just as the vision had foreshown. Now Eos painted the landscape in hues of blood while sending greedy tendrils lashing like rents across the sky. From the plain below a trumpet bravely sent up the call to battle, yet on this morning it was bereft of heroism, plaintive and doomed. In answer, the tramping of 48,000 boots in perfect synchronization split the stillness, announcing the enemy's advance. Reality flowed just as it had unfolded in the vision.

The barest hint of a grin shaped her lips and the fire blossomed in her eyes as she felt the killer within unleashed. The _katalepsis_ was still her birthright even though she had never been born. She saw it mirrored in the eyes of the 8,000 facing her, their bodies now shadowed by the light of the dawn brightening behind them. With her army, she waited. Then Apollo's chariot cleared the horizon, backing her forces with his radiant disc, as if conferring his blessing too on her campaign. Just as it should be, she thought.

The enemy came on, closing the distance against the blinding morning glare, and she let them come, awaiting them with her troops, still as the memorial statues of ancient heroes graven in stone. They had advanced to within a 100 yards of her now; scarcely 60 seconds' march away. Again their trumpet sounded, and with a shout, the 8,000 spears of their hoplite front ranks snapped from vertical to horizontal. Their shields lapped in a barrier wall of bronze. From the ranks behind them, 16,000 swords hissed from their scabbards with a demon's proud roar. Finally it seemed that Athena's army stood as one.

In answer, she raised her right hand, clad in black woven armor. Her 8,000 warriors snapped to attention, the stamp as they set their boots side-by-side resounding sharp as a clap of thunder. She clenched her fist. Each warrior reached up and lowered a single goggle-like filter over her left eye, enhancing their vision into the infrared.

Before her eyes and the eyes of her enemies, her army, 8,000 cloned warriors, each tall and obsidian haired, each bearing a _spathe makra_, (long sword), _xiphidion_, (a dagger), and a circular blade, shimmered and disappeared from mortal sight as if at the waking from a dream.

Then she turned and strode forward to meet the enemy line. For all appearances she was one against an army, yet it was the army whose advance faltered. Behind her the ground shook as her invisible forces followed, their every boot fall striking a tremor in synch with her own. She drew her sword and 8,000 swords shrieked from their scabbards in response. She'd heard the gasps from the enemy soldiers as her warriors had vanished, leaving the barren hill empty under the rising sun, its surface undulating slightly as if overlain by a rippling wave of heat. Hidden in the hill's long morning shadow, the shadows of her warriors could not be seen. Answering their adversaries' sounds of dismay came a full-throated challenge from her invisible army.

"In the name of the Destroyer of Nations! With the Blessing of the God of War!"

And before she lowered her filter and disappeared from living sight, she cried out a single command, "Kill 'Em All!" And then with her army, she charged.

Two heartbeats passed and then an aggregate, warbling whine, louder than a jet engine, lacerated the morning as 8,000 chakrams cut the air. They divided into their halves and suddenly 16,000 razor sharp blades exploded towards the enemy as if they'd appeared from nowhere. They passed inches above the flinching heads of the Achilleses' hoplite front ranks like a flight of argentine swifts. At the apex of their flight they floated for a second and then reversed direction above the rearmost rank of the enemy army. Now they were slicing back on a return course, gaining speed in their downward flight.

A moment later the cloud of whistling blades struck their targets from the rear and the enemy's front ranks fell. With them went the Achilleses' polished shields whose reflected light might have revealed the cloaked warriors. Gone was their forest of spears, leaving the rear ranks vulnerable. Into the resulting panic slammed the unseen lines of the Destroyer of Nations.

The air rang with ululated war cries rising from invisible throats as severed heads fell to the whistling arcs of disembodied swords. Blood fountained up into the air. The menace that Athena's army had felt a week before was instantly eclipsed by this nightmare battle in which those same deadly foes couldn't be seen. Not even the Elainises, weaving their twin blades in swift defensive figure eights could forestall their deaths. The Xenas strode among the doomed with complete impunity, hewing and slashing with feral glee, and shrieking like celebrant harpies who lived only to shed blood.

What warrior's mind could withstand the terror of seeing the comrade beside her hacked to pieces, but never seeing her killer? Who could fight, with mind overthrown by a violence no prowess could address, as trembling hands clutched weapons for which no targets could be found? Their courage fled and their spirits shrank. Fear and horror ruled their souls. All around them bodies fell and blood sprayed, momentarily revealing hazy attacking figures before they disappeared again as the cyber-mimetic fabric compensated. The killing stroke could come from any quarter, unseen and unexpected until the cold steel slammed through muscle and bone and into organs already clenching in spasms of desperation. In panic they recalled that Xena had refused their surrender a week ago. She intended to kill them all.

"_Can one in three of you slay an enemy?" _Athena had asked her warriors in her folly. _"That is all it would take to wipe them out utterly. Yet even that isn't necessary. I say, if just one in five of you can slay an enemy you shall prevail."_

Now not a single clone in Athena's army thought of slaying even one, for not a single clone in her army hoped to live. It took only seconds for the realization that they would be annihilated to overwhelm them. A tsunami of despair inundated the rapidly dwindling ranks. Pulses raced. Hearts fluttered. Adrenaline surged as bodies voided vomit, urine, and feces, futilely lightening themselves for flight or fight. Their enemy granted them neither. Some of the clones wailed and wildly swung their swords in arcs around their bodies. Some threw down their weapons and beseeched their goddess to deliver them from the horror. Some called on Celesta for the sanctuary of death. But on this day, it was the Destroyer of Nations alone who answered their prayers and curses, for each of her clones could slay three of their enemies with ease.

From several years before came the words of the God of War. _"Xena, in this war there can be no satisfactory outcome short of total domination. There is no place to retreat to and there will be no second chance. When you face Athena in battle, it must be with the absolute assurance of your complete victory. The battle itself will be decided quickly, perhaps in no more than a candlemark. There will be no place for shame or mercy; annihilate them all. Afterwards, there will be no place in this world for her...only you."_

Barely a half-hour after the trumpet had rung out the call to battle it was done. Not a single clone of Athena's infantry still lived. All had fallen before the _katalepsis_, and the victors turned to slaying the remains of the cavalry in the adjacent field. An hour past the dawn it was finished, the slaughter complete. The Strymon flowed red and the land lay muddied and reeking with blood and waste. Over the battleground an eerie silence prevailed. The Destroyer of Nations had killed them all.

Now, upon the hilltop, a figure appeared to mortal sight. She stood triumphant and surveyed the corpse littered field. Black hair matted and spattered, black uniform wet with the blood of the slain. On her left collar the Sigil of War, on her right shoulder, the Lion of Amphipolis, and on her right collar, the ring of the chakram. At her waist, the Chakram of Day, and in her upraised hand, a bloody sword. The dedication of the spoils was the right of the victorious _strategos hypatos_. Every living eye focused on her and every ear listened for her words. All over the field of battle, clones decloaked and reappeared.

"Hear me, mortals and immortals alike," she called out as she swept her sword in an arc to encompass the destruction, "here lies a sacrifice worthy of Ares, the true God of War. Accept the offering of your Favorite as a token of thanks for your Blessing and as the first fruits of the New World. Here is victory and death! The unworthy followers of an unworthy goddess have been vanquished in your name."

The words had no sooner left her mouth than a flash of golden light flared on the hilltop beside her. There stood Athena, screaming with a voice louder than a crash of thunder. There were no words, only the pure raw emotion of rage from the Goddess of Wisdom. Her drawn sword was clenched in her right hand and her arm was already in motion. She surged forward, driven by a hatred first born in the ancient world, and inflamed by frustration reborn in the present. The blow was aimed to cleave the Destroyer's head from her body. Divine speed and strength powered the stroke. God's Favorite or not, no mortal-born warrior could have preserved their life against the Goddess of War.

But the blade's stroke never fell. Cloned Xena ducked its arc as she switched her sword from her right hand to her left in a blur of unnatural motion. Athena slashed again with a return swing, but now the Hellene's Bane blocked it with her own sword and locked up their hilts. In a rage the goddess used her divine strength to slam Xena back. The cloned Destroyer gave way, turning her blade to masterfully redirect Athena's force and send her tumbling to the ground. And then the deadly Chakram of Day was at her throat in the clone's right hand. For a moment they froze and the whole world held its breath.

Behind them the azure flash signaled the appearance of the God of War, finally free to act. He had come to defend his Chosen and slay his sister. For the first time since ancient days, he bore a spear while his sword still rested in its scabbard at his hip. But he saw that the fight was already decided, and that his daughter had moved faster than his sister. Xena's mortal clone had moved faster than a goddess!

There was wonder and despair on the face of Zeus' daughter. Defeated in single combat by a mortal! She let her hand go slack and her sword dropped from her grasp in token of her capitulation. Kneeling above her, the clone pressed the ring blade down harder, drawing the slightest upwelling of ichor, immortal blood. Almost, it seemed as if a light emanated from the chakram rather than reflecting the light from Apollo's chariot above.

"Don't even think about trying to roll me off," the clone hissed to the goddess. "I can hew your neck just like I could avoid your sword."

"And anywhere you go, I can take the chakram and follow," Ares told her.

"Kill her on my command, Prima," ordered another clone as she walked up the hill. "There is no place left in this world for her."

"Yes, _Strategos_," the "special" responded. She knew her role and the easy part was done. Now they would break the goddess' spirit completely by demonstrating how hopeless her war had always been.

The eyes of the goddess nearly started from her head when Xena revealed herself. Ares erupted in a fit of laughter. Xena strode up and knelt beside her clone and her enemy. There was not a trace of humor in her demeanor. She too knew her part in the plan.

"Athena, deposed Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare,"she began, opening the traditional declaration of the fulfillment of her oath of vengeance, "you have caused me irreparable grievance by cloning my daughter, by making war on myself and my soulmate, and by causing my soulmate's death. Blood for blood; I cannot forgive.

I cared nothing about your attempt to rule this world or its people. I would never have moved to war in this time had we been left in peace. But by your actions, you unleashed the true Destroyer of Nations and slew the Warrior Princess. Now I am the Conqueror. Now this world will bow to me. Under Ares' patronage and in his name, I will rule it. Upon your death I will hold my oath fulfilled."

Athena looked into the eyes of the mortal woman who was actually her niece, and she saw a depth of hatred there colder than any she'd seen, even in the eyes of an immortal. And now she wondered how she could have missed the obvious? All that time wishing Elainis had been her daughter when her brother's daughter encompassed everything she'd have wished for in a child of war. The goddess belatedly realized that she should have been Xena's mentor instead of her antagonist 2,000 years before. This Thracian, born of a commoner, could have become the bridge that spanned the gap between her brother and herself. Through her, by naming her the first joint Favorite, they both could have ruled. Instead both her Favorite and her brother's had died on the Ides of March. The missed opportunity was more bitter than her defeat.

How could she have been so blind? She had seen Xena long ago. The woman demanding her life now was nothing like her. Athena had never understood that the Xena who had once contested against Caesar was a human woman, spared and restrained from the worst of her divine blood's influence by the very mortal she had ordered killed. Now Athena understood that she had never really _seen_ Xena; when she had looked, she had seen only an enemy mortal. She had never perceived what she really _was_ or discerned her potential. That mistake had undone her hopes and plans in the modern world.

Twice Athena had sealed her own doom. It could only be Fate, she thought in hopeless resignation, the culmination of a destiny she'd been trapped by. It had been in motion since the first day Zeus had split the domain of war within the Olympian order. Now it seemed that she could do nothing but accept the part fate had written for her. Like every ancient, she believed that all the living were subject to it and not even a god could escape fate. Pride and wisdom hadn't availed her. She saw that eventually mortal and immortal alike could only bow to inevitability as their life's threads were woven into the fabric of all lives on the Moirae's loom. That fabric's order was more important than the strands making it up. What had come to pass had been meant to be from the beginning. She had always been destined to lose, and her long life had been lived to facilitate the events of life's fabric as it created the world's history. She saw herself as a pathway more than a person; her ultimate value was in what she had done, not who she had been. It was depressing.

The Destroyer of Nations sneered at her defeated enemy. "How will a god judge a god? Ask Hades when you see him, Athena."

"We are not judged," the goddess whispered, "when our time is done we are consigned to oblivion. Uranus, Cronos, the Titans, the Hecatoncheire, and the other Olympians, all have...faded." Her voice cracked.

"Breaks my heart," Xena said, though her heart had long been unbreakable ice. She opened her mouth to give Prima the order of execution. "Kill her, Pri..."

"No, Xena, wait!" A voice screamed from the hillside.

And the "special" stopped the chakram on the down thrust, absorbing the movement of her arm with the flexibility of her wrist. Her conscious mind hadn't made the decision. Even she couldn't think that fast. No one can truly know how they'll react to a situation until it occurs, despite their training or prior experience. Prima had disobeyed an order from her _strategos_ by reflex, her body countermanding the nerve impulses for an action commanded by her "near self" in response to the request from half her soul. Then like everyone else, she froze. They were here in all their thousands.

Down on the battlefield among the Destroyer's clones, and stretching up to the hill in an irregular group, stood a crowd of blonde women, all identical, and all agitated. The last few were still filing onto the field from the road. Some chewed their lips, some hugged themselves, and some clenched their fists. Their attention was riveted on the frozen tableau of figures on the hilltop.

The cloned Xenas stood staring at them in surprise and wonder. Every one of them knew this woman from a lifetime together, even though they'd never met in this life. A small fraction of them had seen the Gabrielles once from a distance at sea, and they'd never been far from their wondering minds since. Not a single one of the Destroyer's troops thought to stop them or move against them as they walked across the battlefield. For all practical purposes, the Destroyer's army was paralyzed.

Standing among her clones, Xena knew better than to issue commands. She could only try to imagine the shock her warriors were feeling, meeting this person for the first time. She felt it herself, strongly. 8,000 Gabrielles...their numbers magnified their effect.

Xena remembered the first time she'd felt it, in the Pallene outside of Potidaea. She'd stopped dead in her tracks, unable to move. The warrior had just freed the original Gabrielle along with a line of slaves, but a part of her had sworn to never let her go. Some might have called it love at first sight, but this was not Aphrodite's gift. This was the ancient work of the Moirae, manifesting itself again. It had been a meeting of bonded souls and the result of a destiny far older than even the Doric or Ionic migrations; it had already been ancient when Mycenae stood.

In the moment of their greatest distraction, Athena moved with mortal desperation and the speed of a goddess. She had nothing left to lose. Her head slipped sideways clearing the blade, and she wrapped a hand around the chakram. Then with a wrenching twist, she tore it from Prima's grasp and rolled to her knees. It was accomplished in the blink of an eye. Though she knew her part, allowing it was the hardest thing Prima had ever done.

Ares lunged at his sister, viciously snapping the spear towards her, but she spun aside, slipping past the point as it drove towards her chest. She came to her feet and jabbed outwards with the blade, aiming it at Xena'sneck as she stood, her attention only beginning to return from the Gabrielles. Athena hoped that by killing Ares' Favorite, she could share the defeat with her enemy and spoil the Destroyer's victory. The ring-bladed weapon flashed towards its target in a blur.

Then for the third time that morning, the Goddess of War met the unexpected. Xena shifted her body only slightly, but it was enough. As she once had in a Mongolian desert, she snagged her opponent's weapon with one hand and used its momentum to wrench it from her enemy's grasp. The twisting tug she gave it drew Athena's body beyond her center of gravity. A blindingly fast foot sweep dropped her to the ground. Somehow Xena moved her body downwards faster than the goddess fell. She was already on one knee as Athena's back hit the dirt. Before the goddess took her first breath there, the chakram was again held in place at her neck. The clone had made it look easy.

The goddess could barely believe what had happened. In this war, revelation had followed revelation, just as setbacks had been followed by defeat. She remembered that on the day she'd rescued her Favorite at the Temple of the Chakram, Xena had moved faster than she ever had in her original life. For the second time in a row, one of Xena's clones had outpaced her divine speed and vanquished her in combat. She was now thoroughly convinced that _all_ of the Destroyer's clones could move at superhuman speed. The knowledge crushed her. Her army had never stood a chance.

Now a third Xena left the mass of warriors and made her way up the hill. She was identical to all the others. Ares moved to rest the tip of his spear against his sister's chest.

"Secunda, give Ares the chakram," Xena whispered, knowing that even her "special" clones were divided within themselves. She herself felt the conflicting pull of her soulmate's presence, but she would not let this distraction rob her of her vengeance. The God of War had a vested interest in controlling his sister and Xena knew he'd guard their prisoner well. But for the double-bait tactic she'd learned from Mithridates, her victory could have become a defeat. She'd never expected Athena to go down without a fight.

With a gesture the spear vanished and Ares knelt beside Secunda. As he set his hand firmly on the Chakram of Day, he darted her a quick, wry glance. So, he thought proudly, Xena had cloned two "specials" that could pass for her in a god's eyes. Secunda withdrew her hand and then stood up beside her general.

Prima joined them and together they watched as a single Gabrielle hastened up the hill to join them while the rest inched closer, mingling with the troops. The Gabrielle didn't stop until she was only a yard away, looking back and forth between the three Xenas. To her eyes they were identical, but to her heart, they were as different as night and day. She offered Prima a small smile, nodded to Secunda, and then addressed the _strategos._

"Hi, Xena," she said with disarming familiarity, "I see the Destroyer of Nations has won her war. I guess that's Athena?" She cocked her head a fraction towards the figure on the ground. Gabrielle had never met the Goddess of Wisdom.

"She's just another defeated enemy, Gabrielle," Xena softly replied. "The war's almost over, but it can only end with her death."

"_I will find them and I will kill them all."_ Gabrielle whispered. She remembered the words of Xena's oath as clearly as if she'd heard them herself. "I know, Xena. Even when I was dying I knew you'd win your war. I believed. But what comes after?"

"Xena is now the Conqueror of this world," Ares proudly told her. His attention never shifted from his sister. "She will be the absolute ruler of what remains of mankind."

"The Conqueror..." Gabrielle shakily repeated. She could only remember the images of the Conqueror from the TV episode, _"Armageddon Now"_. It still chilled her blood.

"What remains of the world," the downed goddess hissed derisively, "is what hasn't been blown up, contaminated with radioactivity, or overrun by plagues. She's won a war that's left a quarter of humanity dead, destroyed all the oil, and set civilization back over a thousand years. Some things may be recovered someday, but many things can never be the same."

Gabrielle just stared at the goddess in silence for a moment. Over 1½ billion dead? But surely Xena hadn't killed them all. The goddess must have caused some of those deaths. Yet a world based on ancient technology wouldn't be able to support the rest. Another three or four billion could die in the next few years. By the gods, whole continents would reek of the corpses for a century. Athena wouldn't be around to share the blame for them. It was far worse than anything on the TV show had been.

"Is this what you want, Xena?" Gabrielle asked. "What glory is there in ruling an empire of rubble? Somehow, I feel that if you kill her now there can be no turning back."

For a long time Xena didn't answer. For years, all she'd wanted was her vengeance. The oath she'd sworn had driven her and she'd had no reason to swerve from her purpose. She had become all that she'd avoided in her original life and she'd realized her dark potential...her destiny. She'd turned from it once, but in the end, she was what she'd always been meant to be. Ultimately it was fate, and fate was a powerful master. Despite all her prowess and conquests, she was still only a mortal.

If only a single Gabrielle had stood before her to taint her victory with doubts, she'd have already taken her head. The influence of the _katalepsis_ was still that strong within the Destroyer of Nations. But there were 8,000 Gabrielles on the field and their aggregate effect had changed everything. That she could feel doubts at all was proof. Now she fully understood the time bomb that Spencer Trilby had planted in her world. Xena could feel the hint of the Warrior Princess she had once been. Instead of a swift reprisal, she took time and answered from the heart that had been dead to everything except her plan for so long. When she spoke, it was with honesty and resignation.

"Once all I wanted was you," she finally whispered. "We had a lifetime together, and an unexpected reunion. Now I see that it was only a respite from my fate. The Moirae long ago wove what is, and none can escape it." She inhaled deeply, and when she exhaled, the breath left her in a long sigh. "Gabrielle, can you live in my world?"

All Gabrielle wanted to say was, yes. She wanted to be able to accept any conditions to be with her soulmate again. Her character on the TV show had always claimed that, "I love you. Wherever you go, I go." But this was real life, and she had never been that TV Gabrielle. Still, she wondered if somehow it could work.

Perhaps in the slow passage of years, if they were together, she could ameliorate the worst of the Destroyer's rage and maybe even see Xena again as the Warrior Princess. But the blonde knew that those intervening years would kill her spirit. The war was won but the world still needed to be brought to heel. The subjugation of the remains of humanity could take years, and it would be harsh. Pockets of resistance would have to be crushed. With an excess of population, the easiest way would be through extermination. Xena would be forced to annihilate whoever raised their voice against her. The Conqueror's rule would be absolute, and it would be held in trust for the God of War.

Could she love a woman who had laid waste to half a world and consigned it to a second Dark Age? Could she love the slayer of perhaps three-quarters of a billion people? Could she stand the touch of hands so steeped in blood that they could never be cleaned for the rest of eternity? Gabrielle felt her spirit revolt at the thought, and she realized that no, she could not. If she couldn't turn her soulmate from this course, she would rather take her chances alone forever than share in the greatest crime ever committed.

Sadly, she looked Xena in the eyes and tears trickled down her face as she said, "No, I can't. I can't partake of the horror and the killing by supporting you with my love. I would rather die. And this time, I'll pray to Hades to release me from the cycle of rebirth. I won't come back again...just to be alone."

Upon the hill a tense silence hung heavy, as if all of Poseidon's deeps pressed down overhead rather than the clear blue sky. Xena looked at the Gabrielle. For the first time since the blonde had been killed in Columbia, she felt the upwelling of their bond, the very thing whose absence had led her to embrace her destiny. Their love had been like the sun's warmth invested in flesh...tangible, mortal, enticing, and so very fragile. Once it had called to her more compellingly than anything she'd even known. It still did, but only as a reflection of what had been. The Destroyer of Nations had walked a path since that loss, and there was no turning back from her fate. She felt the echo of that loss, but her heart was still unbreakable ice.

"I will set aside a land for you, a place apart from my realm. The Conqueror will never set foot there, but the rest of the world will be under my dominion. I am fated to rule in the name of the God of War. I'm sorry, Gabrielle, this is the best I can do."

Gabrielle felt her hope wither and her heart broke. The best her soulmate could offer was a place of exile from the horrors she would unleash? They could never again be together? But they had a destiny...an eternal destiny...together. Yet now Xena was obligated by Ares' Blessing and bound by her blood. She couldn't change her course. Had the Moirae lied? Had their lives together been but a sojourn into redemption that was fated to fail? Was it but a stopgap measure that had led to this?

The Gabrielle covered her face with her hands and sank to her knees, shoulders hitching as uncontrollable sobs broke from her. This misery was deeper than any loss she had ever known in any of her lives. What they'd avoided on Caesar's crosses had befallen her now. Separation. To think that their great enemy, Gaius Julius Caesar, had granted them a greater measure of mercy than the impartial Fates. Her world was ending. What had been the point of recreating her now? Why had someone recreated so many of her? It was simply cruel.

Xena looked down at the shattered Gabrielle and she felt her wrath rising at her helplessness to counter the bitter measure fate had served. They all live for me, she thought, but there can be no "us" since I can't live for them. She was unable to accept Gabrielle and unable to refuse being affected by her. It was an unresolvable conflict. It had marred her victory and robbed the sweetness from her vengeance. It would shadow her conquests and darken her rule until the end of her days. Never again would she know satisfaction. She felt like a captive slave even though she was the sole ruler of the world. Xena's wrath leapt to rage, and in the Destroyer of Nations it manifested as _katalepsis_.

..._if you kill her now there can be no turning back. _ She turned away from the sobbing Gabrielle and strode toward her enemy with a look of pure animal hatred on her face. The next few moments would be critical. She could display no uncertainty.

"All your fault," she grated out at the goddess as she knelt beside her patron god. "First I'll finish with you. That'll be the last satisfaction my fate can offer."

She snatched the Chakram of Day from Ares and he stood beside his sister, looking down as his enraged daughter foamed at the mouth and tightened her grip with obviously deadly intent. It still gave him a thrill to see her rage, especially after all these centuries.

For Ares, this was triumph. Xena had cleaved to his way, even choosing her duties over her soulmate. Athena simply closed her eyes in acceptance. She would die defeated by her fate and Xena would live defeated by hers. Fate had served them both a cup as bitter as Artemesia. For a moment, the Goddess of Wisdom almost felt sorry for her.

Xena moved to sever Athena's throat, but instead of slicing across her windpipe, she flicked the chakram backhand. It whined up sharply toward the sky on the eastern side of the hill in a short, quick flight that ended when it slammed into an unseen target. The blade rebounded to her hand as the cut pieces of a cyber-mimetic uniform fell away from the wooden frame that held the weapon her clones had recovered. Now uncloaked, the Destroyer of Nations' last gambit was revealed. Soft reddish rays projected from the ruby cabochon of the Eye of Hephaestos, bathing gods and mortals alike in its glow.

Xena had first learned about the eye from Ray Fell when they'd met in California. Later she'd spent many hours questioning the aged Janice Covington. Any weapon that could affect a god was worth knowing about. Almost a year after her war had begun, Xena had returned to the Pappas house, invading the study like a shadow as her old friends reminisced in the parlor. She'd quickly found and taken the notes from an expedition that her distant descendants had made 60 years before. Xena had actually chosen to return to Macedonia because it hosted the Tomb of Ares, while masking her intentions by basing her army in Amphipolis. Like a good general, she had given the appearance of predictability while acting unpredictably. The tactic had worked with the duplicate cloning facilities and the mad Dr. Kishihara.

Ordering the mission to recover the eye had been among her first commands upon reaching the Strymon Vale. Originally she'd thought to use it as added insurance against Athena, giving herself a second chance to destroy the goddess if the "specials" failed.

When the necessities of her situation had changed, she'd adapted like a good general, altering her plan and redirecting her resources, then acting decisively to give herself time that she desperately needed. Having been activated, the Eye of Hephaestos could hold _both _Athena and Ares frozen in place forever. Now the _strategos_ had all the time in the world.

For the Destroyer of Nations, and even more so for the Conqueror, the exercise of her will was paramount. The bonds of Ares' Blessing had become uncomfortable in the face of Gabrielle's reappearance, but slavery was intolerable. She was determined that somehow she would not allow herself to be the slave of fate. Somehow she would spare Gabrielle and the Olympians as well. Somehow, she would find a way to spare them all.

Xena attached the Chakram of Day to the clip at her waist and stood. She looked over her handiwork and then out at the battlefield. All over it clones mingled, Xenas and Gabrielles. Then she approached the Gabrielle who still lay stricken on the hilltop and gently lifted her to her feet.

"Today I'm the Conqueror of gods and mortals, but I'm conquered by my fate and I need your help. There's no victory here for me anymore, only loss without you. Gabrielle, I've destroyed the world. What am I going to do?"

The Gabrielle looked at the Eye of Hephaestos and the two gods trapped in its ruddy light that sapped their strength. She looked at Xena and saw her soulmate revealing her uncertainty and vulnerability. And she leapt to wrap her arms around her.

This clone knew that she wasn't the beloved clone Xena had watched dying in Columbia. She wasn't the one who'd stood with Xena when it had been just the two of them alone in a strange world. But she was still Gabrielle. She realized that Xena was asking for her aid in changing their fate. Gabrielle had no idea if it was even possible, she only knew that beyond all hope she was being given a chance. There was still one more battle to fight.

_Close your eyes and try to sleep now  
Close your eyes and try to dream  
Clear your mind and do your best  
To try and wash the palette clean_

_(Partial lyric from, "_We Belong", _©1984,_ _Written by D. Navarro & R. Lowen, Recorded by Pat Benetar)_ _  
_

_**June 5, 2006 – The Strymon Vale, Macedonia**_

Two weeks had passed since the final battle. The Destroyer's troops, along with the Gabrielles, had gathered the bodies of the vanquished and buried them in shallow mass graves in the field where they'd fallen. Everyone had been thankful that the ground had been softened by a week of rain.

On the hilltop, a tent had been raised over the Eye of Hephaestos and the two gods who stood paralyzed by its power. In two weeks they hadn't moved so much as an eyelash. The simple wooden frame that held the eye had been reinforced, and now a sturdy cairn of stones supported it and insured its stability. Still, the Destroyer of Nations took no chances. Either Prima or Secunda stood a constant vigil over them with the Chakram of Day. Their only order was to kill either god if they moved.

In Xena's camp, some interesting changes had occurred. Without a god of war, the Destroyer's clones had been much more relaxed. Neither Ares nor Athena was active and their domains were diffuse. It was also a fact that the aggregate effect of the 8,000 Gabrielles was pacifying to the Xenas. There had been no episodes of _katalepsis_. The clones had accepted each other's presence with genuine joy, and this took multiple forms. In some cases, clones paired up as the original Xena and Gabrielle had done. In other cases, they formed associated groups that functioned like group marriages. Some Xenas had been lost in the battles and the arrangements absorbed the slight excess of Gabrielles who would have been left alone had all the clones paired up one on one.

The _strategos_ and the Gabrielle who had first spoken to her on the hilltop had become inseparable. Although it would have been impossible to tell at a glance, it was almost certainly this Gabrielle who had been doused with water at the Holy Monastery of Dochairios. To her, Xena had given the hard-shell case that she'd taken from the Pappas house in Columbia. The Gabrielle had set aside the staff she'd built and now openly wore the twin ventilated short swords.

Over the past 14 days, the couple had spent much of their time together planning and plotting, for although they had a future now their task seemed insurmountable. To change fate had always been regarded as impossible by the ancients, and so they'd had to work around this stricture before coming up with an actual course of action. They'd had to find a way to make themselves believe it could be done. The quandary occupied their first days together and it kept them up late at night.

"I always thought the Moirae wove fate on their loom and ultimately every life thread had its place," Xena had said as she and Gabrielle lay in her tent staring up at the ceiling as the night's breeze puffed and rustled the fabric. "Even so, every mortal had some room to make decisions. There was obviously a middle ground between our lives bein' completely predetermined or completely open to choice, some maneuvering room...like following a road but choosin' whether to walk down the center or the edges."

"I've always thought that way too, Xena, but I've also noticed that some people seem to have more room than others. Maybe it's granted to them because they exercise more choice. Maybe it's like some threads on a spool being thicker than others in a market. I know I had more chances to make decisions than someone like Joxer."

"Maybe ya did, or maybe ya just made better choices," Xena had replied, thinking of Joxer for the first time in a very long time. The buffoon had certainly made some bad choices, and some had been made for him. Xena didn't regret her part. He'd died a hero.

"Or maybe the habit of making choices widens the space a person has to choose, sort of like stretching muscles allows a body to gain more flexibility," the blonde had said. "Perhaps the Fates give thicker strands to those who can make the best use of them."

"Are you sayin' that a habit of making choices gets rewarded with more chances to make choices?" Xena was more interested now and she left her reminiscences of Joxer behind. Gabrielle was beginning to make the kind of sense that often led to revelations.

"Well, maybe," Gabrielle said, scrunching her brows as she concentrated on finding the words to explain her thoughts. "You always said it was worthwhile keeping your options open, so what you chose to do preserved them. You were grooming the future to give yourself as many choices as possible, right? So maybe not backing yourself into a corner was a mortal equivalent of what the Fates allow us. If we choose to have more choices, then we'll have more choices."

Xena was silent for a while digesting Gabrielle's words. Who knew what the Fates allowed or how they thought. Ultimately they had to weave all those life threads into some kind of order, didn't they? It implied that their choices were limited too. What the soulmates needed to do was actually change the weaving to create a new order.

"Xena, do you think it's possible for the Fates' loom to weave something wrong?"

The cloned Destroyer's head jerked up off her pillow. The very idea was anathema to the concept of a divine loom. Its whole purpose was to create order. Without it there would be chaos. Gabrielle's question was like asking if perhaps pigs could fly on the eighth day of the week.

Gabrielle looked back at her soulmate. Xena saw that she wasn't kidding.

"Like maybe a thread got into it that shouldn't have ever been there in the first place?"

For the Destroyer of Nations, the world stopped turning. A thread that shouldn't have been there...a life thread that should never have been? Like the life thread of a clone? A mortal who had never been meant to be and hadn't been born? A recreated killer with no business in this world, brought to life by an evil shamaness? An abomination facilitated by science? She looked at the blonde next to her. It couldn't have been her, she thought by reflex; it had to have been me.

"I'm the reason the loom wove wrong," Xena whispered in horror, "I caused this."

Gabrielle sighed at her partner's reflexive self-assessment of blame. It was so like her Xena. The cloned bard didn't see it that simply though.

"I wondered when we were first created if we had souls," Gabrielle began, "and if we had any place in this world. Neither of us was meant to be here in this time, Xena. We wouldn't be except for Alti. Maybe both of us caused the loom to misweave. Now there are thousands of each of us and there were even more of Athena's clones. The more clones there were, the worse things got. As a group, maybe we've upset fate."

Both clones lay in silence and reflected on the horror of their revelation. The Fates' loom was churning out an ever-lengthening bolt of fucked up brocade. History had been mutated and chaos was near. They could believe that their presence had caused the aberration and with every moment fate departed further from what was meant to be. Repairing it didn't seem possible; restoring it was almost as inconceivable.

But the fault couldn't lie with them alone. The clones continued with their line of reasoning, following the trail of events back in time. Alti had begun the whole madness of cloning, acting on a subtle suggestion from Ares. Athena's actions, cloning her army and waging her war, had contributed. And the two gods had been feuding since antiquity.

"If it wasn't just me," Xena asked, "then where'd the disaster begin?"

"I wish we could ask them," Gabrielle whispered.

"Who?"

"The Moirae."

"How?" The Fates had been regarded as even less accessible than the rest of the gods.

"I have no idea."

Neither of the clones had seen or spoken to the Fates in their original lives, and they'd never met anyone who had. In fact, they'd only believed in them in a symbolic way, since they were ingrained in their culture. A millennium before their time, people had taken the Fates, Furies, and all the other orders of supernatural beings literally. By the Hellenistic Era, they functioned mostly as convenient personifications of natural forces. Xena and Gabrielle believed in the handful of gods and beings they'd witnessed, and fitted them into a cosmology they'd inherited along with their language and customs. Neither one of them would ever have thought to pray to the Moirae or expect an answer.

"I can't think anymore," Gabrielle groaned as she rubbed her eyes. She yawned.

"Let's get some sleep then," Xena answered, wrapping the cloned bard in her arms.

And so the day after the battle had ended. Hypnos soon visited the tent and took the Conqueror and her soulmate down to the land of sleep. There, Morpheus brought them the phantasms of his wisdom in the form of dreams commanded by those who had always been. In dreams, one might ask the unaskable of the unquestionable and be answered.

_At the entrance to the dreamscape, vapors and wispy tendrils of cloud languidly floated in a twilit realm of echoes and whispers. It was a place she thought of as the atrium of dreams. Here, the residues of waking life melded and recombined as the subconscious mind sifted through them for associations and meanings._

_She took a few steps forward just to test her feet; okay, she thought, this was not to be a flying dream, at least not at first. Likewise, the edges of the scene weren't dark, nor were the whispers threatening. She'd noticed that sounds came to her in advance of sight, before the fog parted to reveal a scene, and so she always had some sense of what to expect. Now there was no vague and distant neighing of scared horses, and so she inferred that this wasn't to be a nightmare either. That was good; there had been enough emotional discomfort recently. She waited, feeling the childish eagerness that had never left her. Dreaming had always been a favorite part of her sleep. _

_The fog began to swirl as if disturbed by the breath of a great beast. It parted in the center of her vision as it fled, though at first there was only more fog beyond. She felt the strengthening breeze washing across her face and brushing back her hair. She took a few strides toward its source. It was beginning._

_Now she saw the first ghostly indications of a landscape; good straight trees in summer leaf, and a country road with a sliver of cloud speckled sky above its track. She turned in a circle, seeing the last wisps of vapor swirling and evaporating behind her. The road was deserted; she was alone._

_She heard the rustle of a comfortable breeze passing through the leaves above, and the shuffling of small animals in the underbrush along the roadsides. Her eyes detected the quick movements of birds among the limbs as habit made her scan her surroundings more closely. The woodland creatures moved with confidence, for the moment free of the dramas of predation. All was peaceful and nature went about its business undisturbed._

_Down the road where the fog had disappeared lay a field; summer wheat waved there in the caress of the breeze. The road continued through it, dividing the sown ground to the right and left. Beyond the plantings lay a low wooded hill around which the road swept in a lazy curve. Typical of a dreamscape though, the land past the hill was shrouded in a settled bank of fog that hung peacefully, obscuring any details of the more distant land._

_She turned and looked down the road, deeper into the woods. In this direction, the way gently curved and its track was lost to sight after perhaps forty yards. As was often the case, she felt a compulsive curiosity to see around that bend, and she took this as a subtle direction for which way to proceed. And so she took a deep breath and set off through the trees._

_As she walked, she noted that at the margins of her vision, where sight failed among the trunks and foliage, there lay that same fog that had hidden any distant views in the other direction. Here and there, a tendril curled more visibly between boles or through underbrush. There was nothing sinister about it...it was simply a limit to what Morpheus chose to display as pertinent to the dream. _

_When she looked back down the road, she noticed that she'd rounded the bend. As with the limitations on unnecessary distant vistas, distance and travel were often compressed to avoid distractions. In dreams, she'd found that it was most often the destination that was the goal. _

_The road ended just ahead in a clearing, where bright sunlight showered down on a building of gray stone. Though she could see no damage to the structure, it projected an air of dinginess, or of a weathered age that had seen the passage of eons. It stood firmly on a narrow stereobate, presenting a colonnade of unfluted columns and a plain but well-proportioned entablature, neither oppressively heavy nor frivolously light. She saw that no decoration declared the building's function. There were no figures in the metopes and no reliefs within the cornice. The detailing was simpler than that of the established architectural styles, seeming to predate the development of the familiar Doric and Ionic orders. Still, the columns appeared straight-sided, having no visible bulge as Egyptian columns did, and the major elements of the construction were undoubtedly Greek, merely archaic. She found herself standing before it, close enough to see the whole, and many yards into the clearing now. Her traverse from the road's head had been deleted._

_In silence and peace she climbed the shallow steps of the stereobate, then stood upon the stylobate between the central columns. No sounds gave her a clue to what transpired within, no chants, no songs, or whispered converse. No scents came to her nostrils, whether of food, or of torch smoke, or of incense. She stepped between the columns and let her eyes adjust to the peristyle's dimmer interior. Before her she discerned the walls of a pronaos, with similar columns upholding its entry._

_By now, her curiosity had been peaked and she wouldn't have resisted entering the building's interior for anything. The pronaos was deserted, no surprise there, and lit by a handful of sputtering torches in sconces around the walls. These produced torpid, yellowish flames and liberal amounts of smoke, which had stained the walls all the way to the ceiling with soot._

_There wasn't a single thing to see in the pronaos but the entrance to the cella, the building's interior chamber, which was located directly opposite the central columns she'd just passed between. That opening was a plain rectangle, framed by posts and capped by a lintel. None of it was decorated in any way, whether by carvings, appliques, or painted colors. To her ancient eyes, accustomed to polychrome, bas-reliefs, and statuary, the interior felt unfinished, or fallen into a gerontic neglect of many centuries. Through the entrance to the cella came the flickerings of more torches._

_With nothing to see and no reason to tarry, she crossed the stylobate to the cella. At the doorway she heard the first sounds other than her own footsteps or the wind. This was a soft clacking, with no particular rhythm, which proceeded at a comfortable speed. She quickly noted that the sounds came from the single thing she'd seen within the entire structure; a loom so ancient that it threatened to disintegrate before her eyes._

_With each throw and shift the machine shuddered and shook. Its frame was made from timbers silvered with age and eroded by wear. No one worked its treadles or threw its shuttle. Through some enchantment, it seemed to grudgingly power itself. Threads moved of their own accord, but their sources she found were hidden in the dimness beyond the torchlight. So too, the product vanished into a gloom behind the loom, though before disappearing, she could see a mountain of completed fabric in an unruly heap on the floor. In the semi-dark of the cella it held no pattern she could discern, nor did colors individualize the treads in any way that she could see. She approached more closely, moving softly lest her footfalls cause the construction to finally falter and collapse onto the floor._

_Closer up, her original impression of the loom's decrepitude was reinforced. Beneath the moving parts she noticed telltale heaps of splinters and sawdust, abraded from the frame's reciprocating parts. The resulting cloth was just as she'd suspected, utterly undecorated, plain of weave, and completely uniform in texture. The entire mass of the fabric that she could see was consistent. She could barely believe it._

"_This has to be a hoax," she muttered to herself, "mankind's history can't be so boring. Shouldn't there be some differences between a good year and a bad one, or some record of a great event or a disaster? Don't some lives shine out while others blend in? From the looks of this, it doesn't matter what we do or what happens."_

_But as she watched, her killer appeared behind the loom with the nebulosity of a ghost. For the first time, she wasn't dressed as a warrior, and she seemed to be sobbing. She ignored Gabrielle and examined the fabric. Finding a spot some yards back from the loom, Elainis' shade was sucked down into its surface, with an action much like a movie of steam whistling from a teakettle in reverse._

_The loom gave a painful heave in reaction, much like a morbidly obese matron with a gas pain. It jerked in an elaborate shudder, and suddenly several yards of fabric disappeared back into the machine! The separate threads unwound and retracted into the gloom. It was wholly unexpected and completely captivating. She stared at the loom in awe as it lurched back into motion, clacking and, so far as she could see, creating the same fabric all over again. Why bother? The product was just as plain as it had been, utterly undistinguishable from what had unwoven itself a heartbeat before. Somehow, it was terrifying. She awoke with a start. _

At her spasm, Xena's eyes popped open a slit and she tightened her arm around the cloned bard's midriff in a barely perceptible display of protectiveness. Gabrielle sat up, one hand finding her partner's in the darkened tent and interlacing their fingers.

"What is it, Gabrielle?" The Conqueror asked softly. "Nightmare?"

The blonde took a couple of steadying breaths before answering, giving herself a pause to recall what she'd' seen. She'd' found that it paid for her to immediately review a dream if she wanted to imprint the images in her memory, otherwise they quickly faded.

"Not exactly a nightmare," she answered, turning so she was face to face with Xena, "but it was very strange and very unexpected."

"What was?" The cloned warrior coaxed. Like most ancients, Xena took dreams seriously. Whether they arose from the subconscious mind or were visions sent by Morpheus, they often conveyed valuable information.

"I saw what I believe was supposed to be the Loom of the Moirae. I'd walked inside a barren, grubby building and found it weaving all by itself. It looked really old, and literally ready to fall apart. It was making a fabric so simple and plain that at first I couldn't believe it...I guess I still have doubts. Anyway, as I watched, Elainis shade appeared and got sucked into the cloth. Then the pathetic contraption lurched, unwove several yards of fabric, and then started back up again remaking the same exact thing. To be honest, I don't know if I believe a bit of it."

She bit her lip and thought back over it all again. The temple and the loom had been a great disappointment. She felt that something so profound should have had some visible cachet, some aura of distinction due to its importance. It was like finding a king in rags, ruling from a hog shack and emaciated from starvation, yet still clinging to his scepter.

"I never thought it would look anything like that, you know?"

"Guess I never had an idea of what it would look like," Xena replied, "I've seen plenty of looms, but that loom...?" Her voice trailed off.

"It was just so...so mundane...so pedestrian...so old."

"The loom?" Xena asked.

"The loom, the temple, even the torches on the walls," Gabrielle said, "everything."

"It is really old. That much seems right, if ya think about it. Maybe that plain, even fabric is too. It's about as far from chaos as it could ever be, right?"

Gabrielle thought about it for a moment.

"Well, I guess so. Now that you put it that way, it does make a kind of sense."

"What about the Moirae?"

"Xena, the place was deserted. I never saw anybody."

"What a surprise," Xena muttered. It was still true that no one she knew had ever seen them. On the other hand, no one she knew had ever seen the loom before either.

"Let's think about this some more in the morning," Xena suggested. "I don't have any ideas about it now and we can get another few hours of sleep before dawn."

The blonde yawned expansively and snuggled in closer to her soulmate. Moments after she closed her eyes she was asleep. As always, Xena returned to sleep more slowly.

_She turned in a circle as soon as she found herself surrounded by fog. She saw nothing solid behind her or to either side. Letting her senses widen, she detected nothing threatening nearby, no presences, no sounds, but this was the dreamscape and anything could happen. She allowed the ambient tension in her body to keep her concentration sharp. With rapid, practiced movements she searched herself and confirmed that she was wearing her armor and carrying her full compliment of weapons. She thankfully noted good, solid footing beneath her boots._

_When the breeze came, stirring the vapors, she moved to face it, peering ahead to the limits of her sight. First sight could make the difference between survival and death. It could take only that first split second of time to decide the outcome of a confrontation, and she had always liked to reserve that advantage for herself. The fog shifted and began to part, teasing her for a moment with details half-seen and then quickly shrouded again. Enough of this, she thought impatiently, let's see where I am this time. _

_The enshrouding haze parted ahead of her and she moved carefully forward. Leaving the cloudscape behind, she checked her surroundings again, surveying a deserted room. Shadows danced in the light of torches. She searched the room's corners and the areas of deepest darkness, confirming that she was still alone. At the same time, her eyes recorded the details of the space, placement of torches, presence of doorways, absence of windows. But for the torches she'd have judged the place abandoned. No furniture, no decorations, no other signs of occupation._

_No point in staying still, she reasoned. This is a dreamscape and if you don't move first something may find you. She slowly drew her sword, the steel barely whispering as it left the leather scabbard. Amazon stealth guided her feet as she silently crossed the room to the opening she'd noted in the opposite wall. Another chamber lay beyond, where a similar quality of light announced the presence of more wall-mounted torches within._

_Just outside the entrance she paused, listening carefully. She marked the fluttering of the torch flames, but no breathing and no shifting of bodies or clothing. Even so, she entered the room fast, letting her peripheral vision asses the emptiness ahead and to the sides with a glance, before spinning to assure herself of the same emptiness behind. She spun back to face into the room, shifting to the side, out of the doorway. With no one to cover her back, the solid masonry of the wall would have to suffice. Then she felt the hairs on the back of her neck rising and the skin tingling._

"_Who's there," she demanded, turning again to check the entrance, "I can feel you. Show yourself!"_

_Now in motion, she continued to turn and shift, never presenting a stationary target. She'd always believed that it was advantageous to acknowledge an unseen presence with confidence. It didn't matter if it turned out to be a god, spirit, or mortal conjuror, experience had taught her that it was best to let them know they'd been perceived._

"_C'mon," she hissed. "Ya want me? Come 'n get me."_

_She saw the air shimmer in the center of the room and turned to face it. Three figures flickered and solidified, child, matron, and crone. The trio was still and relaxed, not the least bit threatened by her sword. For a moment they stared at her as intensely as she stared at them. No introductions were necessary. She recognized them from a lifetime of references and stories; they knew everyone who had ever lived._

"_So, you're real after all," she said, wanting to get in the first word._

"_Before your time, with your soulmate you fell," the crone said, ignoring her chiding._

"_By a goddess' hand, fate was betrayed as well," the matron said._

"_From Aulis through the ages passed a twisted strand," the child said._

"_Down future days to the Destroyer's hand," the crone said._

"_Lament now all nations, for the past has come to be," the matron said._

"_A path not taken long ago, lost to eternity," the child said._

"_The gift of love's an answer, to change the world with," the crone said._

"_And you'll live to seek your future in those ancient days of myth," the matron said._

"_Lament no more upon that day the blood spilled by your hands," the child said._

"_For through your darkness light was gifted to these mortal lands," the crone finished. _

As she memorized the final lines of the Moirae's verse, she awoke, thinking just how poorly composed the rhyme was. She didn't awaken Gabrielle, but lay in the dark reviewing every detail of her dream and every word the Fates had said. It was a lot to swallow. The revelations gave her some hope. Some good might come from her actions. But the hopeful revelations were eclipsed by two that threatened to drive her from her bed to the tent on the hill in a murderous rage. One was that their deaths had come before their proper time. The second was that a goddess had been responsible. She felt certain that Athena had been involved in their deaths in Rome.

The next day, Gabrielle and the Conqueror spent hours telling each other about their dreams. It struck them as strange that the lines of verse had been given to Xena, while the mechanical vision had been sent to Gabrielle. Even so, they pored over the details.

In their absence, the _chiliarchoi_ ran the camp and the "specials" guarded the prisoners. Every clone felt a bit strange about holding Ares as well as Athena hostage, but their _strategos_ had issued the orders and they obeyed. Though nominally at peace, they were still an army.

It had taken a week, but the soulmates had come to the conclusion that changing the past, if not fate itself, was possible. In fact, they believed that it was fated. The vision of the Moirae's loom, unweaving what it had created and then restarting its timeless task, could be interpreted that way. With acceptance came the need to figure out how. They needed a plan.

On June 1st, the soulmates were sitting on the bluff that had once held the walls of Amphipolis. Nearby, the tributary stream burbled softly within its banks. For the first time, they were out of earshot of the army. The land around them was deserted. The couple had taken the road downstream in the morning and had arrived after a two-hour walk. They'd wanted some time to think and to be alone together. It was a brief respite, but it was dear to their hearts, for both of them remembered years of traveling and camping with only each other for company. Out of habit, Xena found kindling and built a small fire while Gabrielle dragged over a log to sit on.

"In the Moirae's first two lines, they claimed we'd died before our time," Gabrielle began, "and that a goddess was to blame." Sitting beside her, Xena nodded in agreement, seething. "And it makes sense that that goddess was Athena," the bard continued. "The Romans were devoted to Athena's style of warfare...crafty, technologically superior, and based on interchangeable units, not individual heroes. In Rome, science and knowledge drove the creation of an empire where the multitudes were organized like parts in a machine. Caesar personified Rome, advanced the influence of her way, and had always been your enemy. Athena would gladly have delivered you into his hands. I'm almost sure those lines are related because of the rhyming...there are paired lines throughout."

The warrior had always thought that the Chakram of Night should have behaved differently on that ill-fated day. It should never have broken against the armor on her back. Xena had been nowhere near ready to die in 44 BC. She'd had a lot to live for and they'd expected to defeat Callisto. They should have had more time with Eve and Hope...more time with each other. She bitterly resented the divine interference that she was now convinced had ended their lives.

"And afterwards, fate was upset because of her actions," Xena spat.

"Not exactly," the blonde said, "the third line traces the problem back to Aulis..."

"Where Athena saved her Champion, Elainis," Xena breathed, remembering the information Ares had given her years ago in Columbia. At her soulmate's questioning look, she added, "Gabrielle, Elainis is Iphigenia, saved from the sacrifice to Artemis and brought back to life by Athena."

Gabrielle nodded, accepting the explanation.

"It created a _twisted strand_ of fate that ran through history until you became the Destroyer of Nations. You were meant to wage this war, Xena."

She looked over and gazed into her soulmate's eyes, hoping to assuage her partner's uncertainties. For an added measure of reassurance, she nestled against Xena just because she could. It felt far more familiar than any sensation acquired in just the last week. Xena wrapped an arm around her back almost subconsciously and ran her fingertips absently over the skin of Gabrielle's shoulder.

"And laying waste to half the world is going to correct fate just how?" She raised an eyebrow in question. It seemed like a rather drastic cure to her...another Phyrric victory. "Not that I'm unhappy about correcting it by defeatin' her," she muttered.

"Well, that's the deca-drachma question, isn't it?" The blonde clone asked, ignoring her last comment. "The following lines confirm that your war was fated to happen now rather than in the past. The _path not taken long ago_, _lost to eternity_ during ancient times was delivered to you, as the modern Destroyer, in the present."

"So destroyin' the world was a good thing, right?" The grin on Xena's face expressed only partial disbelief. After all, who was she to doubt the Fates?

"Apparently so," Gabrielle agreed, "the very last line seems to tell us that. When the world's corrected, it'll be because you destroyed its twisted fate. And that leaves the last three lines to tell us how."

"I don't think the changes I've brought to the world are exactly _the_ _gift of love_," Xena mused, "vengeance at loss of love perhaps."

"I think a gift of love is what will change the world back to what it was supposed to be," Gabrielle said. She thought for a moment. "You gave me the swords your Gabrielle had before she was killed..."

"You are my Gabrielle," Xena quickly told her, tightening her arm around the blonde and softly kissing her crown of pale hair, "and being back together now is like a different chapter in the same life. I feel the same love for you that I felt for the Gabrielle that Alti cloned, and it's the same love I felt for you 2,000 years ago." She'd met the Gabrielle's eyes and held her gaze as she'd spoken, earnestly projecting the truth of her feelings and reciprocating the reassurance the blonde had given her moments before. Then she sighed and added, "But we're both still living in a time where we don't belong."

"And I thank the gods for every moment of this chance to do it," Gabrielle whispered.

She leaned towards Xena and wrapped her arms around her neck. With the compelling magnetism of new passion and the assurance of long-term lovers, they closed the distance and their lips met in a kiss. And though the kiss was as consuming as any they'd shared, her soulmate's last words stuck in her mind and she knew that sometime later they'd bear further consideration.

June 3rd saw the pair sitting a half-mile down the valley that branched off the Strymon Vale behind the hill to the east of the battlefield. They were partway up the northern slope, looking down on the tributary stream as it wound around rocks and boulders. The sun was beating down strongly, but broken. Fluffy clouds gave an intermittent respite from the glare. Neither soulmate had spoken for some time, both drifting comfortably with their own personal thoughts.

It's still a beautiful world despite the destruction, Gabrielle thought absently. Beside her, Xena twirled a stem of coarse grass between her teeth. The growing seed head spun in a rapid whirl as she worked her jaw from side to side. Her eyes were defocused, denoting that she was running two streams of thought simultaneously.

Gabrielle lay back and looked straight up at the clouds. She let her eyes wander among their billowing peaks and emptied herself of conscious thought. Approaching the same transcendental state that had allowed her to aim an arrow without sight, she floated in the womb of _no mind_. Here, subconscious tidbits and memories came to her unbidden.

"_The gift of love's an answer, to change the world with," _

"_And you'll live to seek your future in those ancient days of myth."_

To be here again together with their love intact was certainly a gift, she thought, rising from the near-transcendental state to one more akin to drowsing. It had been the goal of the compulsion that had driven her since she'd awakened and it had allowed them to change the world in the present, as they never had in the past. I suppose that's why we were recreated in the first place, she mused. Our presence redressed the fate betrayed by the goddess that caused our untimely deaths in Rome. Since the first days after escaping from Alti we wished we could go back to our rightful time, but we were wrong to think we had no place here. And yet I still wish we could go back and _seek our future in those ancient days of myth_. She sat up.

"Xena, I realized that we were always meant to be here. Everything that's happened was for a purpose, but having changed these modern times, I think that our answer to the problem will be to return to our own time."

Xena opened an eye and looked at her closely. The stem of grass had stopped spinning.

"We've changed the world and lived," Gabrielle clarified, "now we should seek to our future in the past...in the time of our original lives...or maybe even back before Athena twisted fate."

"Ya mean go back to Aulis?" Xena asked. "We were never there."

"True," Gabrielle agreed, "but to fix fate, things have to change at the beginning."

"Well, I guess that makes sense," Xena conceded. After a pause she asked, "So what happens now?"

"We figure out how to go back 2,000 or 3,000 years?"

"And what happens to the present? All the clones? Ares and Athena? The rest of the world? All the dead?" Xena had been ticking off the points on her fingers as she spoke.

"It would have been better if none of it had never happened," Gabrielle sighed.

"Yeah, but we can't leave things here the way they are," Xena said with finality.

They continued to think about these problems for the rest of the afternoon.

June 4th dawned and the soulmates stopped for a quick look at their prisoners before heading out of the encampment. Neither god had moved. The Eye of Hephaestos was projecting its vitality sapping rays exactly as it had since first being struck by the chakram. Said Chakram of Day rested in Secunda's ready hand as she stood within arm's reach of both Olympians. The clone was as still as the captive gods. She and her sister Prima entered a transcendental state to stand this guard duty, for the undistractible clarity it conferred coupled with their speed would let them answer a divine threat at the first sign of movement. In the same way, the clone was aware of the soulmates in the instant they drew aside the tent flap.

"_Strategos_," the "special" acknowledged without blinking or shifting her attention.

"Any changes, Secunda?" Xena asked, though she could see none herself.

"Nothing," Secunda answered, "either in the prisoners, or the eye."

Xena nodded and took Gabrielle's hand and the pair left the tent. Today they walked the road upstream, towards Seres, northwest of the battlefield. They moved slowly, having no real destination, but simply wanting to be in motion. Xena had no intention of visiting the city, though Gabrielle harbored the desire to retrieve her journal from the camp she'd sat out the rains in. She had a half-moon's catching up on her entries to do, and that time included all the interesting stuff. At first they didn't speak, preoccupied with their thoughts and comfortable to simply stray down the road side by side. It was one of the most familiar activities they remembered from a life that they'd lived long ago. They covered the first half-league in silence.

"Walking like this, it's almost as if we have gone back in time," Gabrielle observed. Beside her, Xena grunted in acknowledgement. After a pause, the blonde shifted gears and asked a question. "Xena, how did Athena clone Callisto, Elainis, Achilles, and all the others? I'm sure you wondered about that. I know I have since I've been back."

The Conqueror thought back to a talk she'd had with Ares, in their study at the Pappas house in Columbia, shortly after the war had begun. She most certainly had wondered how Athena had produced her enemies...not their manufacture, but their source.

_How had the Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare managed to clone Elainis? Or Callisto? Or Mavican? Or Livia? Or even the failures of Valesca that they'd seen in the lab? They were all long lost to the ages; every cell, every atom, and every memory ground to dust two millennia ago and lying far beyond recall._

_Xena applied the facts to a mental diagram, using the flowchart method that she'd learned from Mithridates and later utilized as a military commander. Eventually she reached an appalling conclusion_

_"Your sister treads the roads of time," she said, "but not with complete freedom."_

_"No god ever acted with complete freedom," Ares replied. "There were always limits. If I had the power to pass through the years, I'd still be limited to revisiting those times and places when I was exalted. Other times belong to other gods. A rule of thumb would be that I could visit times when I had temples full of worshippers. For Athena, this would include the period from the Dorian invasion of about 1500 BC, to the rise of Rome ...or later, maybe 400 AD, if she went to Roman lands in the guise of Minerva."_

_"Could she bring stuff back?"_

_"Oh yeah. I can bring you across space if we're in contact. If Athena has the power to cross time, then she can bring back whatever she can carry."_

_Xena sat for several moments thinking about what Ares had said. If she hadn't seen the cloning lab or known that there had been two Callistos, then she would have suspected that Athena had brought her original enemies to the present. It would have been too good to be true. Athena had only needed to transfer a hair or a few cells from the ancient world to recreate her warriors. Time and her science would do the rest, and for a god, time is an ally._

"She travels time," Xena whispered, "she took the original material for her clones from our time and before."

"And she can take us back," Gabrielle finished.

"When pigs fly," Xena retorted, but she remembered throwing pigs and other animals, both live and dead and sometimes in flames, using catapults to clear the walls of cities she was besieging. The bears, boars, and rabid dogs had been particularly effective.

"Yeah, I guess she isn't exactly feeling charitable towards you, huh?" The blonde said.

Xena had stopped walking, and her eyes had the defocused look they got when she was contemplating dual trains of thought. Seeing this, Gabrielle waited in silence. Finally a smirk formed on the Conqueror's face.

"I could _motivate_ her to take us back to our time easily enough," Xena stated, "but what happens to this world after we leave? Will this present disappear because of changes in the past? Will it continue? No, it won't be enough to offer her a deal she can't refuse. She could come back here and try again. I have to offer her a deal she can't resist."

June the 5th opened with a red sunrise. The soulmates had been awake almost the entire night planning. Some things about the past had become clear, and they were things that could only be understood through the perspective of the present. When Prima went off-duty from guarding the Olympians, she walked to the _strategos'_ tent and joined them.

After the afternoon mess, the three met Secunda in the prisoners' tent on the hill. The atmosphere was tense, but the Moirae's words gave them hope. If they were right, the soulmates could change the world and restore its true fate. They did a dry run to fine-tune their strategy, and when Xena was satisfied, they left.

**Continued in Chapter 12**

58


	12. Clonefic Part 3 Chapter 12 Conclusion

Clonefic

Part 3 Chapter 12

By Phantom Bard

**For Disclaimer**: See Part 3 Chapter 1

_**June 6, 2006 – The Conqueror's Encampment, Macedonia**_

"Are we all clear on the plan?" Xena asked. The three other clones nodded affirmative. They'd been over it time and time again. The Conqueror looked each of them in the eyes and them ordered, "Places." And a moment later, "Now, Gabrielle."

Athena came to wakefulness with the Chakram of Day pressed firmly against her throat. To one side stood Prima, to the other side, Secunda. Each had one hand on the chakram and the other grasping a handful of her hair. The goddess could feel the hatred sizzling off of Xena's clones and knew it was directed at her. Between herself and the Eye of Hephaestos stood Gabrielle. The blonde's body was blocking its rays from falling on her.

"Move and you're dead, Goddess of Wisdom," the Conqueror sneered, "you couldn't even beat one of us and you don't stand a chance of overpowering three."

"I thought you'd have killed me by now, Xena," the goddess said, "what do you want?"

"I have a deal for you, Athena," Xena said, as she circled her captive. "As you know, I can order you killed and you'll be dead before the words are out of my mouth. Of course, if Gabrielle moves half a foot, Ares will be released. I'm tempted to give him the chakram and let you two fight it out for my entertainment." She gave an evil snicker. "Gods fighting to the death as my sport...a good way to inaugurate my rule."

"You've betrayed him, Xena," Athena said, "he'll kill you."

"Not likely," Xena replied confidently, "and certainly not until after he's killed you. Like you, his goal is the supremacy of his way. If I give him the chakram I'll be handing you to him on a platter. I've already handed him the world, and who else will rule earth's mortals in his name?"

Xena saw that her words had struck home. Just as it had after the battle, the flicker of defeat that she'd looked for showed in Athena's eyes. The goddess was wise enough to know that her captor held all the cards.

"What of your deal?" Athena asked. "It seems my only hope is to hear you out."

"It has two parts," the Conqueror began. "First, you will take the four of us to Aulis where we will watch Iphigenia die forever. You will not return to Mycenae with a cloned _abomination_, as your father called her."

At this, the goddess sputtered with a rage she could barely control. Her fists clenched and she gritted her teeth at being dictated to by a mortal. The Conqueror aimed to deprive her of her greatest Favorite, Elainis. No one had guessed that the Chosen she had brought back from Agammemnon's sacrifice was a modern clone. Even Zeus himself hadn't guessed the truth; how had Xena discerned her treachery? But Xena wasn't finished.

"And second, you will return us to Thrace, alive and well, on March 17th, of 44 BC."

At this, the goddess' mouth gaped open and she practically swallowed her tongue. It was all the "specials" could do not to cut her throat by accident as she reacted. She opened her mouth to refuse but Xena beat her by speaking first.

Now she employed the velvety tone she used when cajoling a reluctant ally. Standing in the eye's rays, Gabrielle knew this was part of her soulmate's negotiating technique. The silky voice was just a precursor to a return to the forceful coercion with which she'd seal the deal. She suppressed the grin that twitched on her lips.

"Athena, your defeat here is the payoff for a war you opened long ago by bringing Iphigenia's clone to Mycenae. Only someone who knows modern science could understand Elainis. It changed everything that came afterwards. You can avoid all this by undoing that act."

The Conqueror's words sounded so reasonable in the face of all that had happened. Athena considered them in spite of her resentment of Xena. If she undid her first betrayal of the Olympian gods and their ancient rules of conduct, she would still have a future in which to triumph. Yes, destiny might take a different course, but she would have the chance to twist fate yet again to her advantage. Her present situation certainly didn't have much potential.

But then there was the second condition that Xena had mentioned...returning her and Gabrielle to the world _after their crucifixions by Caesar_. She would be granting them what had been denied to her own Favorite. Even worse, the Conqueror would have two clones with her and three of the four chakrams. The Roman Empire itself could fall and all of later history could change. For a moment she felt the same foreboding Harry Tasker had experienced when Xena had first demanded that he clone her an army. As if reading her train of thought, the Conqueror resumed just as Gabrielle had expected.

"Athena, you have no other choice in this," Xena hissed. She was standing nose to nose with the goddess now and the velvet tone was gone, replaced by the harsh whiplash of command. "Either accept my demands and return us to the world we came from or I will kill you and rule this world I have conquered. I'm only offering you this chance in order to regain the one you stole from me long ago. It's the only chance you'll get."

Athena hesitated and Xena flicked her eyes to Prima's. The chakram pressed more tightly against the goddess' throat. Xena took a step back and shook her head as if saddened, but at the same time a cruel grin curled her lips.

"So be it," she whispered. At her nod the two "specials" forced Athena to her knees. To the goddess' horror, she realized that she was to be beheaded like a common criminal, restrained in a posture of submission at the feet of her conqueror. It was too much, but the _strategos_ still wasn't finished. Athena's humiliation still wasn't complete.

"You've brought this upon yourself, Athena. You were so blinded by your pride and ambition that you didn't even see it coming. It's the trap of destiny that I turned away from long ago. I beat you with technology and science, and now Ares can add those to his domain. So, Goddess of Wisdom, where's your wisdom now?" Xena sneered down at the Olympian she'd effectively stripped of her spheres of influence; war and wisdom both sat in the mortal hands of Ares' Favorite.

"This world needs only one God of War," Xena announced. "Gabrielle, prepare to move so that Ares is released. I think it'll be a valuable pledge of faith and my contrition if he gets to watch her execution and the mutilation of her body."

"Good thinking, Xena," the blonde said. She leaned to the side a bit so that her body impinged on the rays from the Eye of Hephaestos and they no longer projected onto the God of War's boots.

Athena's eyes started from her head in horror. Xena intended to subject her body to post-mortem defilement. Her corpse was to become a mortal's war trophy! Her indecision and paralysis broke.

"Alright! I'll do it."

At Xena's nod, Gabrielle moved back so that the eye's rays fell fully on Ares. She took the hand Xena stretched out to her, and Xena linked her other hand with Athena's.

"Time to go," the Conqueror ordered. And then she moved in front of the eye's rays, releasing the God of War. He was already leaping aside as Athena and the clones fled.

The flash of gold flared in the tent and the five figures disappeared from the modern world. They crossed the aether under watchful eyes that none of them could see, and reappeared at Aulis on the lower slope of Glypha, the hill that rose above the Temple of Artemis on Boetia's shore. Practically at their feet lay the long bay that separates Euboea from Boetia, and covering nearly all the water's surface lay the Achaean armada. To Xena's practiced eye, it was nowhere near a thousand ships...700 tops, maybe, she estimated, not enough for a decisive siege at Ilios. The war would stalemate.

All around them the press of warriors from the kingdoms of Hellas hustled to and fro, chaffing to sail to war against the Dardanians. Gabrielle marveled at the shields and cast bronze swords most of them bore. They're dull as spoons, she thought, hardly more than clubs. No one saw them on the hillside, for by Athena's power they remained invisible.

Their gaze fell on a crowd standing before the Temple of Artemis. Its attention was centered on a young woman, robed in white, that they all recognized. Iphigenia looked exactly as Elainis' clones had, but her bearing was resigned rather than haughty, and it transformed her beauty from icy to compellingly heartbreaking. Around her stood her father, King Agammemnon, and the other "heroes" of the Achaean army, waiting with vulturine impatience for her to be sacrificed. To the side, several of Artemis' priests restrained a protesting woman of mature beauty, Iphigenia's mother, the Mycenaean Queen, Clytemnestra. The king appeared grim and determined. His brother, Menelaus, the King of Sparta and Helen's cuckolded husband, stood smirking with satisfaction. It was an ugly gathering, resembling not the best of Hellas so much as a pack of jackals. The soulmates were saddened, the two clones gritted their teeth, and Athena stood silently with tears trickling down her cheeks.

A priest came forward and offered a prayer, then bared a dagger. Iphigenia was forced to her knees where her head was jerked back to bare her throat while an attendant held a krater beneath her neck to catch her blood. The crowd buzzed and pressed forward in morbid anticipation. Clytemnestra wailed. Iphigenia sobbed. The blade came down.

Suddenly there was a flash of green light at Iphigenia's side, and the dagger slicing towards her neck stopped in midair. The priest's wrist was held in the viselike grip. Before the crowd stood Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt, who had demanded the sacrifice.

The priest dropped the blade and fell on his face in reverence. Around the temple a breeze quickened, the first to be felt in weeks. Men raced to their ships, the sacrifice forgotten as their hopes of sailing to war were renewed. Artemis turned her head, giving Agammemnon a sour look and a nod. Her eyes found the queen's, making contact and offering her a small smile. She took Iphigenia's hand and raised her to her feet. In the last instant before she disappeared with the princess in a flaring emerald light, her eyes sought those of her sister.

"You spared her," Athena whispered, "thank you sister."

A disembodied voice softly answered, mildly chastising.

"I have spared us all, Athena. Fate is bound to time, and to alter one is to alter both. Seldom does passion rule the Goddess of Wisdom, but it's coming is as an obsession."

"Now on to the next," Xena ordered. Athena nodded in assent.

In the split second before the golden light flared on the hill of Glypha, Prima released her hold on the chakram and Athena's hair. When they reappeared, there were four figures, not five. Athena stared at the three remaining clones in horror.

Xena reached over to Secunda and took the original Combined Chakram she carried. She gave it a meaningful look and then attached it to the clip at her own waist. Next she replaced the clone's hand, clasping the Chakram of Day with her own, and keeping it pressed to Athena's neck. For a moment, her eyes met those of her "special". They shared a private look that passed between two beings so close that they were "near-self".

"Check in Rome," Xena instructed. "I believe things have changed."

"Yes, _Strategos_," Secunda answered, "I'll destroy Callisto and take the Chakram of Night." And then Secunda turned away and began walking up the road to the northwest.

Xena sighed. She suspected that they'd soon hear stories of a young Xena, returned from the grave to fight with paired chakrams and unnatural speed. Against the aging "Warrior Queen" it would be no contest. Once Secunda was finished in Rome, she'd return to her duties as guardian. The "special" had her mission.

"Prima has succeeded by now," Xena said to the goddess. "1,100 years in the past, Ilios has fallen. The future you created is no more, Athena. It's grown from those days forward as it was meant to. Perhaps we were meant to die at Caesar's hand, but now I have the Combined Chakram, not Callisto."

She removed the Chakram of Day from the goddess' throat. Athena stared at her, still unable to comprehend what had happened. Gabrielle did the bard thing.

"When we first appeared in the 21st century, we met a historian who was convinced that Troy had been destroyed in a war with Greece. We tried to set him straight about it. There were other things he 'knew' about ancient history that we knew were wrong...things that just hadn't happened. Eventually we came to understand that the past lives we'd lived were wrong...that something had changed the world we remembered. Our past wasn't the past of the future world we were in and it wasn't the world that was supposed to be.

It took a long time for us to figure it out. I had to die and Xena had to destroy that future world. Finally we discovered that fate had deviated long before our time because of your plots and Elainis. The Moirae worked for 3,100 years to set it right. Now it is.

See, among other things, the historian told us about some ridiculous gambit in which the Greeks pulled back from Troy and left a giant wooden horse as tribute. When the Trojans brought it inside their walls, the Greek soldiers inside emerged, opened the gates, and sacked the city. A plan like that wouldn't stand a chance. Twenty soldiers wouldn't be able to overpower the garrison at one gate, let alone a whole city...unless at least one of them could move unseen and strike too fast to be overcome. With Prima inside the horse, the plan could have worked."

"There's nothin' for ya in the future now, Athena," Xena added, "if it even still exists, Ares rules there with my army, so ya may as well be the goddess of this time like you're supposed to be. Ares an' the other Olympians are here. This is your world and this is your time."

For a while the three lapsed into silence. They were all thinking. At last, Athena shook her head and looked at the two mortals standing before her. As she had realized in a future that had never been, one of them might hold the key to ending the rivalry between herself and her brother. Maybe some day...

"What you say makes sense," she admitted, "and any future I shape begins here in the present. The future path I created was a disaster for everyone. I'll just have to pick up where we are now after finding out what's different and what's the same."

She didn't smile, but she didn't threaten them either. Instead, she flashed out of their presence in her now familiar golden light.

Xena let out a piercing whistle. A furlong up the road, Secunda turned to catch the chakram that Xena sent winging her way. She clipped the plain ring to her waist and then continued on her journey. The direction didn't concern her. All roads led to Rome.

"So now we're back," Gabrielle mused, "in Thrace, six miles north of Amphipolis if I'm judging the terrain right."

"And I'm guessing it's March 17th, or close to it. Spring's here and the river's still high with snowmelt. We'll head home and check to be sure what year it is."

"I have to wonder about all the clones in the future," the blonde said, "whether they disappeared or whether they're still there in that other timeline."

Xena looked at her soulmate for a while, thinking about the question. There was really no answer she could give; there was no way to be sure, though she had her own suspicions. For them, that reality had ended just as it should have, on June 6, 2006. The End of the World...6/6/6, Armageddon Day; the day the God of War arose to rule.

"All I know is that we aren't in that timeline," the Warrior Princess said, "but we're back in our own time despite being crucified. How're we gonna explain that?"

The bard thought about it and then laughed softly. "It's not like everyone's seen it on the evening news, Xena. Most people won't know or won't believe the stories from Rome. The few who do will realize that we're young again and they'll suspect that the gods did it. At least we won't have to explain ourselves...to ourselves."

It was true. The clones of Xena and Gabrielle were decades younger than their original selves who had died on Caesar's crosses just a couple of days before. As in any time though, people would explain the miracle in the way they found most acceptable. Xena chuckled at the thought of meeting her original older self and Gabrielle's. They'd have been the most stubborn and suspicious audience possible.

The blonde clone could never remember being happier in any lifetime. She and her soulmate had a second, no, a third chance to be together, and this time, it was in a time and place where they belonged. And, Gabrielle thought, my beloved warrior has beaten the Fates themselves. In all the histories I've ever read, no one has walked away from such a destiny, twice. She was _kori Polemos_, born to be the Destroyer of Nations, became the Hellene's Bane and subjugated the world as the Conqueror, but Xena turned her back on it all, and now she's mine. Surely her hardest battle was fought on the ground within her soul. Again, we are together; we are one. This is our fated destiny.

"Let's go see Eve," Xena suggested. Then she hesitated as she realized something else, "Gabrielle, she's 24 now. She's only two years younger than we are."

"And we're the same age finally," the blonde snickered. Xena groaned.

The pair turned southeast and headed down the Strymon Vale towards Amphipolis. They walked the dirt track at an easy pace in the morning sunlight, their clasped hands swinging between them. Soon they encountered riders, hikers, and wagons drawn by beasts of burden. People looked at them a bit strangely if they paid them any attention at all. Locals knew the couple, and though their ages had changed and they were younger now, it could have been the work of the gods. It was unexpected and uncommon, but not regarded as impossible in that time. They waved in response to those who greeted them.

_**September 12, 42 BC – Amphipolis, Thrace**_

"Well, the word's out that Antony and Octavian are going after Brutus and Cassius."

"So what, Gabrielle?" Xena asked, barely looking up from the maps she was using to instruct Eve in battle tactics. "Romans were born to kill Romans, and Hades take the lot of 'em."

"I was just wondering if we might want to slip out and gut Brutus in the confusion."

"Count me in," Eve offered enthusiastically.

The deep-throated growl from the Warrior Princess told Gabrielle that her notion wasn't welcome at the moment. She'd spent four years now teaching and reforming Livia. Being her mother, she'd never be finished to her own satisfaction.

_(These currently being the last two years of her original life and the first two after her return to Amphipolis as a clone. She was ever vigilant for signs of backsliding.) Editor_

"Okaaaay," the blonde said. "On a different note, I finally finished my poem about the future. Eve, you might want to read it sometime. It's called, _'The Lay of the Conqueror'_, and it's all about the world that we changed before we reappeared."

"The Conqueror?" Eve teased. "Sounds like someone had a good time."

At this, Xena produced a long-suffering groan. She wasn't very keen on her daughter learning how her mother had destroyed the world...something many orders of magnitude worse than anything Eve had ever done while calling herself Livia. She was afraid that the "girl" might find it inappropriately inspiring.

"You're tryin' to poison my daughter's mind," she mock-accused, "givin' her crazy ideas about things that'll never be...thank the gods."

Gabrielle threw up her hands in resignation. She planted a soft kiss on her soulmate's dark hair, winked at Eve, and then wandered out of their chambers, heading downstairs to the common room of what was still called Cyrene's Inn. At the bar, she poured herself a mug of cider and took a sip. She realized that she still missed Pepsi. The clone wandered over to a vacant table and sat down to think.

Amphipolis was their home now. It had been since they'd "returned" from the dead. To the people of the city, they were the second-generation proprietors of a respected inn and esteemed consultants in times of war. Both Xena and Gabrielle had created innovative improvements in their home _polis_...civic works and other practical adaptations of future technology. They were both more formidable fighters than they'd ever been, but their great enemy, Julius Caesar, was dead. These days most of Xena's energies went into rehabilitating Eve. Although the soulmates considered themselves retired, they would still respond to occasional requests for aid. In the last two years, though, they'd undertaken only five major missions...all for the Greater Good.

Gabrielle split her time between her soulmate in Amphipolis, and her daughter in the Amazon village. In fact, she realized that she was due to visit there soon. The tenth moon of the year marked Hope's birthday, and Gabrielle had made a point of being present for it every year since her return. This time it would be her 18th. Maybe this year she'd take off for a few weeks and extend her visit in the Amazon village. She could stay there with Hope and Secunda and continue her writing.

In Rome, "Xena" had been reported living in the Amazon village, more deadly than ever after her resurrection. She obviously had no love of Romans and the massacre of Caesar's Praetorians in 46 BC was still well remembered. More recently, three weeks after her crucifixion in the Eternal City, Xena's nemesis Callisto had been found cut to ribbons, and her trophy, the Chakram of Night, had vanished. In a typically self-serving move, the Senate had confiscated Callisto's reward money, renamed Xena _Primus Inimicus_, and reposted the bounty on her head. In the last two years though, no one had tried to collect it.

Gabrielle smiled, thinking of the reasons that the Romans were so wary of moving against the sisterhood. After the massacre of Pompey and his legions there in 58 BC, the tribe had grown in power. There were more warriors now and they were better trained, but there was also a terror in those forests that stayed Rome's territorial ambitions. The Destroyer of Nations, and her divine _katalepsis. _Six moons after her return, she had single-handedly wiped out almost an entire centuria for their incursion on Amazon land. A _hekatontarchia_ of the nation's army had stood by, observing her techniques. The "special" knew almost everything that Xena knew and she was now a guardian again, as well as a tutor. Secunda had continued executing a last mission for her _strategos_.

"_Protect the Nation, protect our soulmate's daughter"_.

_**Mt. Olympus – Timeless**_

"Brother, I have a proposition for you."

"You're going to move out of the Halls of War and concentrate on weaving?"

"Very funny...for mortal humor. No, brother, I have had an inspiration. It appears that your greatest Favorite has changed. She has gained in both lifespan and prowess, but has rejected her role as the Destroyer, and none of this was your doing. Am I right?

Then there is also the 'other' who has appeared, but by our father's decree, she is an abomination and outside our jurisdiction. At the same time, my own last Favorite was a great disappointment. Now I have a proposal that might settle our long feud."

"Athena, your last Chosen is dead. There can scarcely be a more disappointing condition for a mortal." The God of War chuckled.

"Ares, I've come to believe that my backing of Caesar was misplaced. Xena is your daughter, but that also means she is my niece. She won't serve you anymore, probably will never serve me, but there is no mortal who better represents both our domains in warfare. She is both glorious and brilliant, blessed with strategic acumen and superhuman prowess. She is the best now living at both negotiation and combat. She should be a Favorite to both of us."

The God of War couldn't believe what he'd just heard. It went against centuries of rivalry that had become deeply habituated. He was loath to share Xena and yet the cessation of hostilities between himself and his sister would allow him to concentrate on other things. It was tempting, but there were other options. He had sensed the spark of destiny in one of the young Roman leaders, and just maybe, it was coupled with the strength to master it.

"Sister, I will give your proposal thought," Ares said, "but perhaps you would contemplate a counterproposal? There is a young Roman general that I believe has great potential. I won't touch him so long as Xena lives. He might be perfect for you. I suggest that perhaps you should favor him, but curtail the antagonism between your new Favorite and mine. In the years ahead, it will serve no purpose. Rome will be the dominant power for centuries. We could lose them both in another clash."

Even as Ares spoke, he was interested in a longer view. He was happily watching Xena and Gabrielle training Eve, while in the Amazon village, the "abomination" trained his next Favorite. It would be a while yet, but she would come to him fully trained by the best. At all costs he would steer his sister from the possibility that stared her in the face; that she approach Gabrielle and force a wedge between the soulmates. Now, if Athena followed his suggestion, both of the soulmates' bloodlines would be more safely preserved. Athena would preoccupy herself with the empire, but eventually Rome would fall, he expected, in less than 500 years. By then, Xena and Gabrielle's descendants would number in the thousands. But these were things the Moirae had shared with him, and he would utter none of it to his sister.

Athena gave thought to her brother's words. She knew how sharp his eye was for talent. Perhaps things had changed since she'd been away, or maybe things were back as they should have been. She mentally reexamined the leadership of the empire, which had begun vying to fill the power gap left by the death of Gaius Julius Caesar. Cassius, Antony, Brutus, Lepidus, and the kid, Julius' adopted heir, Octavian. She liked none of the older leaders. Perhaps with her favor and inspiration, the young Octavian could rise above them all. Perhaps.

"I will give your suggestion serious thought, brother. And in the meantime, I will not act against your Favorite or her soulmate."

_**August 14, 1940 – The Tomb of Ares, Macedonia**_

"Oh my," Melinda Pappas exclaimed. She reached for a scroll that protruded from the hidden repository she'd discovered, and then called out to her partner, Janice Covington.

The blonde archeologist hustled over and looked at what had caught the tall Southerner's eye. Her own lit with excitement. Over three dozen scrolls, astonishingly well preserved, and she could tell at a glance that they were of the same vintage as those already recovered from the Amazon village site they'd excavated the year before.

"This is a treasure," she declared happily, taking the one Mel offered and gingerly unrolling it in the torchlight. She held it so Melinda could read it, trusting her translating skills much more than her own.

"Hon, this is in Gabrielle's hand, but it's about the Trojan War," Mel said.

"What? Lemme see that!" Janice demanded in disbelief. She read it out loud.

"_In the twelfth hour after the zenith of Helios, Xena, the Warrior Princess, burst from the wooden horse, moving too fast for the warriors of Ilios to withstand. She fought her way past a score of guards surrounding the Hellenes' gift and then vanished from mortal sight. The screams of defenders rang out from the precincts of the west gate, but none could overcome the prowess of the Warrior Princess. In a quarter-candlemark, the great gates of Ilios stood open and the army of the Achaeans surged into Priam's city on its windy hill. The sack began and ten long years of bloody war came to an end at last."_

The language was so straightforward that Jan could read it herself. Even so...

"Is that what you got, Mel?" Janice asked uncertainly. She couldn't believe it.

"Exactly, darlin'," Mel said, "you're gettin' better at translatin' all the time."

"But the Trojan War was over a thousand years before Xena's time."

"Maybe Gabrielle was takin' liberties with her scrolls?"

"Huh, fiction...that'd be a first," the archeologist muttered. "How about the next?"

"_Odysseus Returns to Ithaca_," Melinda pronounced, reciting the title as she passed the scroll over to her partner. "Looks like they're in chronological order, Jan."

"Do I want to know what's next?" Janice asked, now fearing that she'd been the victim of an elaborate hoax. Melinda took a third scroll and partially unrolled it.

"_The Song of David and Goliath_," Mel read, wincing as Janice gagged at the words.

"Just kill me now," Jan groaned, "nobody'll ever believe a word of it."

After a dismal moment while she sighed and moaned, sinking toward a fit of depression, Dr. Covington asked what the last scroll contained, "since you said they seem to be in chronological order, Mel."

"_The Warrior and the Emperor_," Melinda Pappas recited, opening the scroll. A short silence was followed by another exclamation of, "Oh, my!"

"Do I even want to hear this, Mel?"

Melinda scanned the text quickly, not answering at first. Behind her glasses, her eyes got larger and larger as her disbelief graduated to incredulity.

"This scroll opens in the first year of the reign of Octavian. That would be in late 27 BC. After bein' proclaimed Augustus and granted _imperium proconsulare_ status for the western provinces by the Senate in January of 27 BC, Octavian left for Spain and Gaul in June. Later that same year, he signed a decree of amnesty, pardoning Eve for her actions against Rome, ostensibly as thanks for ridding him of his old enemy, Brutus, in 39 BC. The agreement saw Eve reciprocate by foreswearing any further actions against Octavian. That decree was never published, since negotiating with her would have strained his relationship with the army that had fought her for so long. At the same time, he also entered into a verbal agreement with Xena, then age 43, renouncing her status as _Primus Inimicus_ and withdrawing his adoptive father's bounty, in return for the same oath. With Xena, he couldn't afford to put anything in writing, but he apparently trusted her to be bound by her word. Gabrielle was also included in that agreement. It seems that the Warrior Princess and the Amazon Bard trusted Octavian as well."

"That has to be a hoax, Mel. We know Xena was born in 97 BC and would have been 70 or 71 years old in 27 BC. Her years as a threat to Rome would have been long past. Why would he have bothered?"

"I can't honestly say, but there's more. Augustus returned to Rome in 24 BC, and the next summer, in 23 BC, he was granted the status of _imperium proconsulare maius_, with powers of intervention over the whole empire, not just the western provinces. He was also made a tribune. In the fall, he met with Xena and Gabrielle again. Since they were no longer named as enemies of the empire, he could grant them imperial appointments as liaisons to the provincial governor of Macedonia for relations with the Amazons. This was another astute political move since by then, the Amazon's War Queen was Gabrielle's daughter, Hope. The very next year, 22 BC, he began a tour of the eastern provinces. He'd paved his way for a peaceful trip and avoided campaigning against the Amazon Nation."

Janice Covington just shook her head and sat down hard on the stone bench next to her partner. The scrolls were unbelievable; they had to be fraudulent. There was no question about it in her mind. She could never publish the translations as historical fact. Finally she shook her head sadly. Her father would have been heartbroken.

"Let's pack them up and get out of here, Mel," she said, putting the first four scrolls into a shoulder bag. "We'll study them outside and maybe we can make some sense out of this travesty then."

Within two days, Dr. Janice Covington was ready to cry. Not only did the scrolls span a ridiculous period of time, but they also named mythical characters as if they'd been real acquaintances. _The Warrior Princess, _and_ The Unchained Heart_ involved the legendary Herakles. They related a convoluted tale of love that grew from a combat over Herakles' assault on the Themiscyra Amazons.

Apparently after aiding in the destruction of Troy, Xena had traveled east along the southern coast of the Black Sea. There she had met and befriended the tribe, and became involved in the sisterhood's attempt to retake the Girdle of Hippolyte. She had trained one of their most controversial war queens, the youngest to rise to that office. In the conflict she fought and eventually fell in love with her distant relative, the son of Zeus. Even more eventually, he became equally enamoured of her. More eventually still, they parted on good terms, expecting to meet again.

The later scrolls, telling of the soulmates' adventures in the Roman era, were also confusing. In some, Xena fought for the Greater Good with Gabrielle at her side. In others, she defended the Amazons while bearing twin chakrams and possessed of a battle rage so overwhelming that her reputation alone kept the empire at bay for two decades. It was almost as though two separate Xenas had existed in that time. And then there was the lifespan disparity. It seemed as if the soulmates had somehow shed 25 years and their age difference. Jan even wondered if the ancient legends of ambrosia had any veracity.

_**June 6, 1994 – Los Angeles, California**_

"Well, Sam, what do you think?"

"I think the concept has possibilities, Rob, though it's unbelievable, of course."

"You mean the historical accuracy angle? It's all a fantasy. No one's going to pick at that detail. C'mon, it's barbarian babes with swords, kicking ass. What could be better?"

"Sure, the pre-adolescent guys will eat it up, but I doubt there'll be much interest from the female audience...and no one over twelve will ever tune in."

"Well, you can't have everything. I still think it'll fly; especially when we introduce it during the Hercules show we've got in production. They're a perfect match; they shoot on the same sets with the same costumes, and we can even recycle the talent. So what if it never becomes a hit? At least we've got sponsors. We'll be doubling our footage output at minimal production cost and keeping a foot in the door with the syndication."

"You're right. It's a great business concept. We could get a season or two out of it."

"Yup, and then we'll pitch that pet project we've been developing..._Jack of All Trades_."

_**June 2, 2000 – Columbia, South Carolina**_

Ray Fell pulled the aging VW minivan to a halt in front of the old wood frame house. The pancake engine in the back gave a heave and a gasp and then settled down to cooling with a hiss and an assortment of pings. Behind him, Lynn pulled their second van to a stop and shut off the motor. It actually hacked and wheezed like an asthmatic. The nomadic historian knew that the vehicles were on their last legs. It was time to settle down. Besides, he wanted to give their young new addition a more stable environment.

"Ok, we're here," he announced.

"Oh cool," Angie happily said as she popped open her door. She caught a shoelace on the doorframe and landed on her face on the strip of lawn at the curb. The can of Pepsi in her hand bounced across the sidewalk. She laughed and picked herself up.

"You alright?" Ray asked. He'd never known anyone so clumsy, or so irrepressibly good-natured, or, (in his academic opinion), so unrelentingly cute. He and Lynn had rescued the runaway girl and she'd fit right in with them, optimistic, helpful, and affectionate despite having spent the last six years in an emotionally cold foster home with distant parents and spiteful siblings. Ray simply couldn't believe that anyone would treat the lovable girl like anything but pure gold.

"I'm okay, Ray," Angie told him without a second thought. She brushed some stray grass off her shirt and looked up at the old house. "So this is where your teacher lives?"

"That's right...Dr. Janice Covington. She's a crusty old goat, but she's smart, and has always been an individual. I've told you about her."

Lynn and Allan walked over and joined them.

"Looks like Janice is getting some new neighbors," Lynn remarked, glancing at the massive moving van that was being unloaded next door.

Allan looked nervously at the moving men who were shouting back and forth in Russian. Ray and Angie watched as a car and a motorcycle pulled up in front of the truck. A slim woman and an equally slim daughter got out of the car, both brunettes watching as a muscular man pulled his helmet off and swung his leg over the bike. The three waved at the group of nomads and then turned to watch the moving men's progress.

At that moment, a wheel dolly shifted under the refrigerator they were muscling through the front door. It hit the doorframe with an audible crunch. One of the Russian movers shrieked and danced across the lawn holding his crushed hand to his chest. The new residents' father moved swiftly to assess the injury. The mother shook her head. The daughter looked slowly over her shoulder at the group watching from the next yard and her eyes settled on Angie's. The girl looked to be about her own age. She really hoped the blonde was cool, though she looked an awful lot like Britney Spears.

Angie met her eyes with a smile. It was her natural first reaction to people. The girl looked like she was a borderline punk, worldly if not cynical, but Angie sensed she had a good heart underneath. Angie waved. The ex-runaway knew how it was, moving to a new neighborhood where you had no friends. At least the girl next door was bringing her family with her instead of being sent off to live with strangers like she had. Well, maybe they'd get to know each other eventually. The girl didn't wave back, but a small smile tentatively curled her lips. Angie thought she was pretty when she smiled.

Ray Fell had watched the drama next door, but now he turned to his own "family".

"Let's go in, shall we? It looks like we're loitering." Ray had spotted the local police.

Angie giggled, then waved at the policemen riding past in their cruiser. The officer who was driving, a handsome young black man, waved back and favored her with a smile in return. His older partner carefully took in the scene from the passenger's seat and decided it wasn't suspicious. They drove on without stopping.

The four nomads walked up to the house and Ray knocked on the front door. It opened, revealing a dark skinned woman in her 60s who met them with a broad smile.

"Why Dr. Ray, how ya been? Lynn, honey, you're lookin' well," Dora greeted as she motioned them in. She knew better than to give Allan more than a smile and a nod. He nervously tried to smile back. "Hello, darling, what's your name?" She asked Angie.

"It's Angie, ma'am," the teen answered seriously, then broke into a wide smile. "I'm real pleased to meet you."

Dora was charmed, noting the girl's pleasant manners and her slight Texas drawl.

"Well, don't just stand on the doorstep now, c'mon inside. Dr. Janice is in the parlor but she's been a might cranky this morning," Dora warned with a grin.

"I heard that, Dora," an elderly woman's strong voice called from the parlor to the left of the entrance hall. "You're tarnishing my reputation with some of the few people who don't already think I'm senile. You're a knave, Dora...now be a dear and fetch us all a round of whisky. It's not everyday I get a visit from a doctor who isn't planning on sticking me with a needle."

"I'll bring you some lemonade or ice water, Miss Janice," Dora replied without batting an eye, "these folks have come a long way to visit with you, so behave now."

Ray and Lynn chuckled. "Hospitality" was a long running joke between the two women and they'd heard some version of this exchange many times before. In 25 years, Ray had never seen Dora relent and serve alcohol. He knew that before he'd met her, Jan had had problems with liqueur. Once Mel had informed Dora, Janice had never had a chance.

The group gathered in the front parlor and seated themselves around the room in comfortable antiques. After Angie was introduced and examined by the aging archeologist, and they'd caught up on each other's doings since the last visit, Ray broached the topic he'd come to discuss.

"Janice, I know you're familiar with almost everything that goes on here in Columbia," he began, "and, well, the mini-busses are on their last legs. Lynn and I aren't getting any younger, and we're thinking that we should give Angie a more stable life than what we've had."

"Finally settling down, soldier boy?" Janice teased. "There's nothing wrong with raising a family, and typical of you, it's not a conventional situation." She turned her attention to Lynn and asked, "So, are you favoring Columbia for your first home?"

The heavyset musician laughed and nodded her head.

"It'll be quite a change, having one address instead of two-dozen post office boxes, but I think I can manage the transition, Janice," she said. "I can still have my music...so can Allan, and we've even discussed what to do here."

At this, Dr. Covington raised an eyebrow.

"Jan, do you know of any eating establishments for sale outright, or interested in acquiring working business partners?"

Janice had to think only a moment before calling her long-suffering domestic.

"Oh, Dora, could you join us for a moment, please?"

The woman came into the parlor and Jan waved her to the seat beside her on the sofa.

"Dora, are your cousin and his wife still set on retiring before the University opens for the fall semester?"

"They certainly are, Miss Janice. They're pushing 70 and the Congressional Diner is going up for sale in July. They're heading to Louisiana to be with my aunt's family in New Orleans. Have you suddenly become interested in starting a new career at your age?" She teased her boss.

"Me!?!" Janice sputtered in disbelief. "Not in this lifetime! Ray and Lynn here are interested in getting into the 'hospitality' trade," she explained. "You know they're both wonderful cooks, Dora, and they've decided to settle down here in Columbia."

"Well, bless my soul," Dora exclaimed, "why that'd be perfect. Cousin Lenny and Flo would be mighty pleased to turn their place over to new owners who appreciate history and can cook. It's a package deal though; you get the premises, the name, and the menu, and you can't change any of it for five years. I know Dr. Ray was probably thinking of cooking army chow..."

Ray looked at Lynn and saw her nod. They could accept having all the work done for them so they'd be able to concentrate on getting into the swing of their new lives without having to reorganize a business at the same time.

"It sounds perfect, Dora," Lynn said, "could you speak to your cousins and tell them we're interested in their diner?"

"I can do better than that, Miss Lynn. Why don't we all go over there for dinner tonight? We can get everyone fed and you can discuss business." She was thinking of taking a guilty break from her Lean Cuisine meals, and she knew Dr. Janice loved her cousin's fried chicken.

"Sounds like a plan," Ray happily agreed. They weren't booked into a campsite yet and that meant they didn't have time to cook. Usually they resorted to commercial fast food and he despised the stuff. Angie, Lynn, and Allan nodded.

Later that evening, as they were walking out to leave for the diner, they saw the new neighbors struggling into their house with bags of groceries. They stopped briefly so Janice could greet the new folks next door.

"It's a quiet neighborhood," the aging professor told the younger couple, who'd introduced themselves as Harry and Helen Tasker. "I'm sure you'll come to like it here as much as I have these last 60 years. You can find almost anything nearby, even though it's a much smaller city than Washington."

"Tonight I'd settle for a good place to eat," Helen confessed, "by the time I get dinner ready we'll be too tired to eat it."

"Moving day," Harry said, and shrugged, "I guess I didn't realize we had so much loot to move in and organize."

Ray and Lynn thought of how little loot they'd acquired during their years packing everything into their mini-busses. Their settling down would only be difficult because of the intangible factors, the mental and emotional adjustments.

"Why don't you two join us?" Lynn offered. "We're going to look at a diner."

Helen and Harry looked at each other for barely an eye blink before yelling "Dana, we're going out to dinner."

The teen bolted from the house a moment later.

"Our neighbors have invited us to join them for dinner at a local diner, so unless you want a microwave TV dinner, hop in the car," Helen instructed.

Dana had been staring around and her eyes lit on the antique mini-busses at the curb that the uber-hippies were piling into.

"Mind if I ride with them, Mom? Those old style SUVs look way cool and you can ride with Dad on the bike."

Harry gave Ray an exasperated look, to which Ray said, "We've got plenty of room, and she can help push if we break down."

Harry nodded and Dana quickly moved toward the VW bus. She'd only seen vehicles like them in retro ads and music videos. She hopped into the back seat as Angie scooted over to make room. The two teens looked at each other for a brief awkward moment before Angie smiled and coaxed a hesitant smile out of Dana in return.

"Hi," Angie said, "so, where ya'll from?"

"I used to live in McLean, Virginia," Dana answered, "How about you? Do you live here?" She nodded over her shoulder at the Pappas house.

"Nawww," Angie answered with a giggle, "I ran away from home and Ray an' Lynn found me. We all live in campsites, jus' travelin' around."

"OMG, that is soooo awesome!" Dana exclaimed. It was way cooler than anything she'd heard about in the suburban neighborhood where she'd grown up. They heard Harry's Harley firing up outside. Ray and Lynn piloted their mini-busses from the curb with lurches, grinding gears, and wheezing protests from the engines. Ray led the convoy, following Dora's directions.

By the night's end, Ray, Lynn, Lenny, and Flo had reached an agreement in principal and had decided to meet with a lawyer the next afternoon to begin writing up the transfer of ownership and clarify the details. The perspective new owners had offered to volunteer some time working at the diner while the old owners were still around so they could see just how they ran the place. Ray and Lynn were more than willing to gain what knowledge they could from Lenny and Flo before they retired. They'd fallen in love with the immaculate retro diner on first sight.

Also by night's end, Ray and Lynn had met Alexander and Karen Williams. The couple stopped in the diner once or twice a week. Karen's parents were friends of the retiring couple, having grown up in the same neighborhood that had once been deeded to the freed slaves by the Pappas estate after the abolition in 1865. Alex took Ray aside and warned him that he and his partner, Marcus Lewis, usually stopped by for coffee during their patrol shift, and that they'd arrest him if the cuisine faltered under the new management. Ray had confessed that he'd been contemplating serving army-style meals, since he'd learned his first kitchen skills on KP in Nam. The policeman groaned. He'd grown tired of military fare during his stint, but he wound up laughing with Ray as they started what would become a lasting friendship.

And finally, that night it appeared that Angie and Dana were headed to being new best friends, though they really had very little in common. Each was the only other teen either of them knew in their new hometown, and they actually got along very well. Next fall, they'd both begin attending a new high school, and having at least one friend there would be a source of support for the two new girls in town.

_**July 1, 2000 – Columbia, South Carolina**_

Dana came out of her new home and immediately noticed the strange car in the driveway next door. It was an old fashioned muscle car, and she thought it looked pretty hot. It was glossy black, had fat tires, and a boxy scoop on the hood. Inside she could see a roll cage like what a racecar would have. Maybe it belonged to one of the old professor's ex-students. If so, then archeologists were a lot cooler than she'd ever suspected. When she thought about it though, she realized that the only archeologist she knew was Ray, Angie's "dad". He qualified for cool in her books.

As she continued to check out the car, the professor's kitchen door opened and a tall woman with long black hair walked out. She was wearing cargo shorts, a black tank top, and carrying a can of Classic Coke. Her eyes were hidden by folding Bausch and Lomb Wayfarers. Lean muscles rippled beneath her tanned skin. She paused for a moment, gave Dana a slight nod, and then turned back to the kitchen door.

"C'mon, Gabriella," she yelled, "we're gonna be late meetin' the realtor."

"I'm coming, I'm coming," a good-natured voice answered from inside.

A moment later a short blonde woman bounced out the door, turning to pull it closed and then joining the taller woman. She was wearing white tennis shorts that displayed the muscular legs of a gymnast, and a powder blue cropped T that showed off chiseled abs. She shook out slightly damp, short pale locks and offered Dana a warm smile. Then she got in the passenger's side as the car's engine roared to life. To Dana, it sounded like raw power, an impression that was reinforced when the brunette revved up the engine before rolling the car backwards down the driveway. For a moment the vehicle sat still in the road, then it lurched into motion with a chirp of the tires and took off down the street. Dana didn't believe for a moment that the two women were archeologists.

Since it was summer and she didn't have school, Dana was off to visit her only friend, Angie, at the Congressional Diner. The deed had just changed hands, and the ex-runaway was helping her "folks" with the business. Dana walked down the street, following in the wake of the black racecar.

A half-hour later she was sipping a glass of lemonade in the diner, chattering with Angie as she stared out the front windows. As if it were appearing out of a mirage, the same black car came rumbling past. It slowed and then pulled to the curb outside of a boarded up storefront several doors down. Sure enough, the same tall brunette and the short blonde got out, along with a nervous looking man in a suit. The realtor, Dana thought, happy to be privy to the information she'd overheard.

"Know them?" She asked her friend.

Angie looked out the window and shook her head.

"Never seen 'em before in my life," the girl told Dana, "but that's an old Camaro."

"They're Dr. Covington's great niece, Gabriella, and her partner, Serena," Ray told them, having come up behind the two teens unseen. "Janice said they're planning to open an athletic school of some sort."

Dana and Angie looked at Ray with curiosity. What kind of a school, they wondered.

"They drove in from California last night and they're staying with Janice until they get themselves settled here in Columbia. I'm kind of surprised that they're already talking to a realtor though. I guess they like to move fast."

Considering the car, their behavior made sense to Dana. She watched to see when they came back out. After a half-hour, the trio exited the building and locked the door behind them. They piled into the racecar and drove off. Dana found herself curious about the women, the car, and the school. It wasn't anything diabolical, but it was the closest thing to a mystery she knew of and it was going on right next door. Besides, it was summer and she was bored.

The next time she saw the two women, they were in their backyard, which Dana had learned was much larger than the Tasker's backyard. They were in the middle of a sword fight and the sounds of the clashing blades had drawn the teen's attention. She watched over the hedge for a long time before going back into her house.

In the meantime, when she'd visit Angie at the Congressional Diner, Dana had noticed the process of renovation going on at the empty building the women had visited. A plywood contractor's wall had gone up in front along the sidewalk so she couldn't see any details, but workmen came and went, tradesmen's trucks were constantly parked out front, and building supplies were delivered. The sounds of power tools and transistor radios came from within the barricade. At least once a week, the teen checked their progress from a booth in the diner. For some reason, her curiosity had been peaked and it just grew as the renovations proceeded.

_**September 8, 2000 – Columbia, South Carolina**_

School had begun and Dana had made a stop at the Congressional Diner a regular thing on her way home. Since the first day, she'd ditched the school bus and walked with Angie, then sat and drank lemonade or Pepsi as they chatted. Today, there was a change. The contractor's barricade was gone, the renovation was finished, and the storefront sported a new sign. The two girls didn't even stop at the diner. They walked directly to the newly opened space and stared through the window. Their curiosity quickly changed to amazement.

The space was a single stark room. The left wall was mirrored floor to ceiling, the right wall was bare save for a weapons rack. Equally spaced in the ceiling, two large whisper fans spun, drawing out heated air. The back of the space was walled off to create a locker room. The area in front of the locker room hosted boxing equipment, a hanging heavy bag and a spring mounted cylindrical bag on a stand, both brand new. A speedbag hung under a backing board in one corner. Nearby was a stack of cinderblocks supporting a thick canvas sack filled with steel shot. In the opposite corner, down a short corridor that passed the locker room, was a fire door with an alarm.

Dana's next door neighbors were near the center of the long room and both of them were moving fast; the swords in their hands were lost in a blur of motion. The overhead florescent tubes were still off, but the afternoon sunlight pouring through the large front windows lit the pair as they fought. It glanced off the whistling blades, defining their arcs with glittering reflections and spectral highlights that flared briefly as the weapons made contact. The two women didn't stop and start. They attacked and defended continuously at the same relentless speed, neither making a visible error nor giving her opponent an opening to exploit. At the rate they were swinging their weapons, a mistake could have had catastrophic consequences. It looked much more dangerous than anything either girl had seen in the movies or on TV. The teens stood holding their breaths as they watched. Neither of them noticed the two Columbia municipal police officers who'd walked up and now stood behind them.

After what seemed like an hour but was probably only ten minutes, the two women slowed and eventually stopped. They turned to meet their audience. The girls were petrified by the intensity of the expressions on the women's' faces.

"Excuse me, honey," a middle-aged policeman asked Angie as he moved to walk past her through the door and into the school. Angie moved to the side and they traded small smiles of familiarity as he and his younger partner passed by.

"That has got to be the most complex weapons form I have ever seen," the younger officer said in awe. His own smile and sharp honest eyes flashed brilliantly from skin as dark as ebony. Both of the women could feel his genuine interest in what he'd watched. "I'm Officer Lewis," he said, venturing into the school a few steps and offering his hand to Serena, who was closer, "and this is my partner, Officer Williams." The older officer smiled at the women as he too moved into the school to join them.

Serena shook Officer Lewis' hand, feeling the strength of his grip and noting the calluses on the knuckles at the bases of his index and middle fingers. "Pleased to meet'cha, Officer Lewis. I'm Serena Pappas and this is my partner, Gabriella Covington. You study too, don'cha?"

"You're very perceptive," Officer Lewis replied with an appreciative smile. "I've studied Hung Gar for eight years. What's the system you teach called? Some of the movements seem familiar, but I really can't identify it."

"Actually I'm not surprised that it's unfamiliar," Gabriella answered. "We're the only teachers. The system's a historical relic and was only rediscovered by my great aunt about 60 years ago. We've spent our whole lives studying it and we're opening this school to pass on some of what we've learned."

"Some of the movements look like they're from southern Chinese systems," the older officer guessed, "but a lot of them aren't Chinese at all. The whole system looks vicious, very suited for practical application. I'd venture to say, scary."

"It should be, ya know," Serena replied. "It comes from practical combat in ancient times. The exercise ya saw is derived from a solo form called 'The Katalepsis'. We've analyzed the original technique an' calculate that it results in exactly 100 deaths."

"Katalepsis is not a Chinese word...I know that for a fact..." Officer Lewis began.

"It comes from ancient Greek, and translates roughly as 'battlemania'," Gabrielle said, "but 'The Katalepsis' doesn't contain any out of control movements. It's precise, deadly, very difficult to learn, and extremely efficient. I've studied it my entire life and still can't perform some things right...especially the original solo exercise."

"You said it was a relic system," Officer Williams said, "so, how did your great aunt learn it?" A relic system was one in which the continuity of teacher to disciple had been broken and the direct passing on of information had been interrupted.

"Actually, she never learned it," Gabriella answered, "she discovered the scroll and her partner translated it. They spent decades, generating sequences of line drawings to make sense out of the text. More recently, we've created computer simulations."

The officers gave them curious looks. If they hadn't seen these teachers' proficiency, they'd have suspected a martial arts scam. As it was, they were both intrigued.

"Who originally developed this system? Where and when was it used?" Officer Williams asked.

"It's attributed to a warrior of the 1st century BC, named Secunda. She taught it to the Macedonian Amazons. It was a system of armed and unarmed combat that she said had come from the 'Strategos Hypatos', and ultimately from Ares, the Greek God of War. It was deemed unbeatable when mastered. They used it to defend their territory for nearly 350 years after the Pax Romana broke down, while the Amazon Nation still maintained a visible political presence."

"Weren't the Amazons a Greek myth?" Marcus Lewis asked. He remembered them vaguely from his high school world history class.

"Actually, now they think they were around all through the Roman Empire," Dana interjected, speaking for the first time. She'd learned about the newer archeological discoveries in her school in McLean the previous year. "Some people think they'd been around a long time already, but they disappeared when Rome fell to the Visigoths in 410 AD." Next to her, Angie favored her friend with a proud smile.

The police officers looked at Dana with renewed interest. The punk-looking kid actually remembered stuff from her history classes?

"That's partially correct," Gabriella said, smiling at the two teens. "In fact, the Amazons persisted long afterwards, but the Amazon Nation disappeared as a political entity. It wouldn't surprise me if there were still some Amazons left in the world." She flicked her eyes to Serena's, whose right eyelid twitched in something shy of a wink.

Their great aunts, Janice and Melinda, had published only a small fraction of the scrolls they'd eventually unearthed in Macedonia. Most, both from the tomb and from the village site, had never been released. There had been a prodigious trove of material that they'd kept semi-secret. These had become their joint obsession; comprehending the social framework within which Xena and Gabrielle had functioned.

While the world watched a TV show based on some of the Roman era material that had been embellished with a large dose of fiction, the bulk of the scrolls dealt with the culture of the Greek Amazons. What it amounted to was a manual for a lost culture, including its history, mythology and rituals, military science, social and survival skills, and some tantalizing hints about that culture's disappearance.

Serena and Gabriella had been born into a wellspring of ancient knowledge. For some reason, that ancient culture had resonated within each of them with more purity than the modern culture into which they'd been born. With the elder members of their family as teachers, they'd grown up practically bicultural. They could live off the land, speak, read, and write ancient Greek, Latin, and the dialect of the Pontus-Caucasus tribes. They could wage war and heal, grow crops and raise livestock, build, spin, and weave. They knew most of what an ancient Amazon would have known.

"So what ya'll are teachin' is Amazon warfare?" Angie asked, intrigued.

"That's just part of a whole program. There's meditation, history, ethics, and even some healing techniques. We're teaching Amazon training methods as depicted in Secunda's scrolls," Gabriella confirmed. "We've both been active in sports all our lives, as well as other martial arts. Neither of us has ever found a tougher workout geared to women."

"So, when do your classes meet?" Marcus Lewis asked.

"We're just openin' an' we don't have a schedule set up yet," Serena told him, "but we're flexible, an' we can work with advanced students who've got jobs. Maybe the beginners' classes'll be on weekends or in the afternoons...we'll just have to see what the students need."

In the two policemen's eyes, she saw the spark of interest. They would be welcomed as the school's first advanced students. Their class tuition would defray some of the costs and legitimize the purpose of the Columbia School of Martial Science. Eventually they'd compete under its banner and spread its reputation.

In the two teens' eyes, she saw the flaring of imagination. Now that she and Gabriella were finally ready to teach, they'd be looking for girls and women for whom the idea of the Amazons sparked something more intense than interest. The school was intended to eventually teach much more than combat techniques. It was a gesture, an outreach to something she believed still existed. Someday, perhaps its lessons would bear fruit, she thought, someday maybe they'll contact us.

The End

Phantom Bard, Brooklyn, N.Y.

August, 2004

**The Lay of the Conqueror **

(Author unknown, circa 42 **BC**)

**Come** to me at twilight when the shadows fill the shade,

Caressing all the world with night, so gently day to fade.

Then gift me O my goddess, with a song for every age,

And let me sing it truthfully upon this mortal stage.

* * *

I'll tell of things to shape our world in centuries to come,

When men shall fly, the earth unite, and speak with anyone.

They crafted like Hephaestos, and in hubris knew no shame,

Until they raised an ancient curse, the long lost Hellenes' Bane.

* * *

Lament the fate of future days in Wisdom's power snared,

Both mortal and immortal caught, by Science none were spared.

She germinated veiled plots, waged wisdom's frontless war,

Unseen and unsuspected, ever lurking at its core.

* * *

**Come** to me at morning as the clouds don Eos' hues,

Waking Helios' bright blessing, to prophesize my news.

Then gift to me the wisdom unlike those across the sea,

Not to necromance the living in lives never meant to be.

* * *

I'll sing a requiem for souls borne out of place and time,

For those not born of mothers, hapless victims of Her crime.

But like Cronos to Uranus, and then mighty Zeus in turn,

The clones slew their creator and with hatred watched her burn.

* * *

Lament these souls from ages past, adrift in future days,

Assailed by all its madness, unaccustomed to its ways.

They gave the world that which they knew, hard won in days of yore,

Until they found their enemy, the proud Goddess of War.

* * *

**Come** to me in darkness where Persephone is blind,

Interring all the world with night that's deeper than a mine.

Then into hidden places where discoveries are made,

Await such scenes of horror to make mortal conscience fade.

* * *

I'll sing to you of motherhood frustrated yet again,

A daughter slain, a sacred pyre, an oath of blood begins.

And then upon a heartbeat, yet a greater blow was borne,

A pair entwined was sundered and from love a heart was shorn.

* * *

Lament the souls of ancients ground 'neath battle's heated steel,

When Cupid's flush was sacrificed and broken on the wheel.

Now heart of fire to heart of ice, a living heart to mourn,

O Phobos, Deimos, Nemesis, your equal has been born.

* * *

**Come** to me when winter's snow lies thick upon the ground,

Cloaking all the world in white and shrouding every sound.

Then gift me with a peace so still, all's frozen as in death,

And the only hint of living is the billow of my breath.

* * *

I'll sing to you of battle fought on ground within a soul,

When men and gods contested 'neath the sacred olive's bole.

Medusa bearing aegis facing He of reddened spear,

In sibling conflict rampant ran through every mortal year.

* * *

Lament now for this future time, its doom so close at hand,

God's blood, God's blessing, frozen soul, an army soon shall stand.

With will of iron and sword of steel, the Hellenes' Bane arose,

And strode a disbelieving world, whose time had reached its close.

* * *

**Come** to me in summer when Apollo's disc doth reign,

Blazing through the heavens and inciting warfare's flame.

Then gift to me a conquest with all lands bent to my will,

When all earth's nations bow to me, Nike proclaims my skill.

* * *

I'll sing to you of destiny, of fighters all the same,

Each born of one, yet from no womb, in the Destroyer's name.

As Eos rose to battle's call upon that fateful hill,

Then 'neath Helios they vanished, bright ichor and blood to spill.

* * *

Lament now all ye nations, for the past has come to be,

A path not taken long ago, lost to eternity.

But on that day of glory even Clio held her breath,

When the Strategos set Day's Chakram to bright Athena's neck.

* * *

**Come** to me with hidden light, illuminate my soul,

Transforming rage and darkness there while thawing out the cold,

Then gift to me an answer I could change the world with,

And we'll live to seek our future in those ancient days of myth.

* * *

I'll sing to you of healing and of two hearts lost and found,

And of a war that never was, fought on enchanted ground.

'Till timeless love rekindled as the earth went up in flame.

And history repeated what had ever been the same.

* * *

Lament no more O nations bright, your life has been redeemed,

Through changes wrought by heroes only Mnemosyne esteemed.

The past through present sacrifice has been their just reward,

Eternal soulmates proved the heart is mightier than the sword.

* * *

**Come** to me in Elysia where we'll sip the nectar sweet,

Rejoicing there together on the day Fate bids us meet.

Then gift to me your loving heart I need more than my own,

And all the blood and all the pain will finally have flown.

* * *

I'll sing to you of lifetimes in a never-ending row,

Shared reincarnations the Moirae promised long ago.

And so one day we'll take up our mortality again,

Bearing witness to a future world where we've already been.

* * *

Lament no more upon that day the blood spilled by your hands,

For through your darkness light was gifted to these mortal lands.

Then on some blessed morning in that lifetime yet to be,

While riding through a field, I'll see you and you'll see me.

**Here ends the Lay of the Conqueror**

(Attributed to Gabrielle of Potidaea - Trans. by Melinda Pappas 8/1941)

_**Appendix 1** (Titles of TV episodes in Italics) _

**The Journey of Soulmates**

Xena and Gabrielle's Timeline

**(As reported by the Clones)**

**100 BC **Gaius Julius Caesar is born in Rome.

**97 BC **Xena is born in Amphipolis, on the border of Thrace and Macedonia.

**90 BC **Callisto is born in Cirra, on the north coast of the Gulf of Corinth, near Delphi, in Phocis.

**89 BC **Gabrielle is born in Potidaea, at the narrows of the neck of Pallene, the western most peninsula of Chalcidice.

**80 BC **The warlord Cortese's army attacks Amphipolis. After their defeat, Xena is driven from her home, estranged from her mother, and blamed for the death of her brother. She begins a two-year apprenticeship under Mithridates VI, the King of Pontus.

**78 BC **Xena takes command of an outlaw army, having deposed their leader, and transforms them into a pirate force. She sacks Cirra and many other coastal towns on her way towards Corinth, where she is forced to withdraw after a protracted stalemate.

**77-73 BC **Xena encounters Caesar for the first time, holding him hostage during the sack of Thasos. The Roman navy rescues him and Xena rues the decision to stay her hand and not execute him when she had the chance. Caesar defeats Xena's pirates. They become enemies for life. With her forces in shambles, she accepts patronage from the God of War, becoming known as the Favorite of Ares. She travels through the eastern steppes, as far as Chin, regrouping and forging a new army. During this period, Xena is first called the Destroyer of Nations. For another three years she leads her growing forces in mayhem, eventually becoming such a threat that she is finally defeated by an uneasy coalition of Athenians, Corinthians, and Greek and Roman mercenaries.

**The Early Years (72-70 BC)**

(These 3 years were Gabrielle's most active as a writer.)

**"Sins of the Past" (72 BC) **The meeting of soulmates, Xena is 25 and had already been a warrior for over 7 years, the last 5 as a warlord commander. It had been about a month since she'd left her defeated army when she rescued Gabrielle, who had barely turned 17. She was ignorant, idealistic, but also loyal, feisty, and most surprisingly, literate. Within a year, Xena teaches her the nerve pinch and basic staff fighting techniques. (Note that the word "Sins" in the title reflects the Christian ethos of the modern translators. Gabrielle's clone stressed that the ancient Greek word she'd used could be more accurately translated as "Dark Deeds". It was a vernacular expression, where "dark" was synonymous with "bloody" or "violent", and didn't carry the implied moral judgement or condemnation of the word "sins". This relates to the bard's presentation of Xena's past history as a warrior, from the attack of Cortese to their meeting outside Potidaea.)

**"Chariots of War" (72 BC) **Xena and Gabrielle assist a Thracian settlement in repelling a warlord's army. To break the siege of the settlement, Xena resorts to coating hogs and cattle with pitch and bundled straw, and then stampeding the livestock into the enemy lines after setting them afire. These flaming "chariots" introduced the bard to the horrific necessities of war, and the understanding that her soulmate would do whatever was required to save the settlers. It was her first real introduction to being forced to choose the lesser of two evils, a demand they jokingly came to refer to as the "Greater Good". Gabrielle notes that the battle was followed by a victory feast of BBQ'd pork and beef.

**"The Reckoning"**

**"The Greater Good" (72 BC) **The soulmates deprive the warlord Talmadeus' army of supplies with a plan to demonstrate a farming village's resolve with a controlled crop burn. The army was threatening the city of Abdera, but without food, the army would fall apart. Somehow the burn got out of control and destroyed all the crops. The army disbanded, the city was saved, and the farmers starved. The Greater Good was served. The episode, _"The Greater Good"_, made from this scroll was almost unrecognizable.

**"Callisto's Predations" (71 BC) **This scroll became two episodes, _"Callisto"_ and _"Return of Callisto"_. It should be noted that Perdicus was Gabrielle's cousin, NOT her husband, and that at Gabrielle's urging, Xena spared Callisto's life an unprecedented second time. Callisto was tried and imprisoned for 20 years on Shark Island.

**"Is There A Physician in the Stockade?" **This scroll was originally a manual of Xena's battlefield medical techniques, and was written during the Mitoan-Thessalian Conflict. Sections detail first aid, triage, surgery, bone setting, and herbology. In addition to giving rise to the episode, _"Is There A Doctor In The House?"_, this scroll includes an anecdotal story that became the core of the episode, _"In Sickness and In Hell"_. Note that there was no word for "doctor". Healer, physician, and butcher were the applicable contemporary terms.

**"Hooves and Harlots" (70 BC) **Note that the actual scroll was as much a history of the Amazon and Centaur cultures as a chronicle of a dispute with a neighboring warlord. It was during this dispute that Xena's son, Solon, (age 5), was actually killed. We are given a rare account of the rage of the Destroyer of Nations. Elements of this history appear as background in several TV episodes, including, _"Hooves and Harlots"_, _"Adventures in the Sin Trade 1 & 2"_, _"Lifeblood"_, and _"Orphan of War"_. For her defense of a wounded Princess Terreis, Gabrielle is made an honorary friend of the Amazons.

**"When In Rome" **This scroll tells of the origins of the struggle between Julius Caesar and the Warrior Princess. Julius Caesar's ransom and defeat of Xena's pirate army is included as background, while her revenge, achieved by freeing Vercinix and arranging the execution of Crassus, is presented as current. It gave rise to the episodes, _"Destiny", "The Quest"_, and _"When In Rome"_. (Note that some scholars believe Xena's actions were aimed at avenging the death of the rebellious gladiatorial slave, Sparticus, a fellow Thracian, who died at Crassus' hand in 71 BC. This goal is as valid as that of freeing Vercinix or destabilizing the Roman leadership by breaking the First Triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus.)

**Xena and Gabrielle's first trip to Chin (70-69 BC)**

(Over a year of travelling, the trip was, in part, a measure of expedience, putting the soulmates beyond the reach of Julius Caesar and the vengeful Romans.)

**"The Kingdom of Lao" (70-69 BC) **This scroll became the episodes, _"The Debt 1 &_ _2"_. Xena assassinates Ming Tsu to honor an old alliance, securing the rule of the House of Lao. Gabrielle first uses the Sai in battle and they become one of her favorite weapons.

**"Bad Rye" (69 BC) **This scroll was greatly dramatized and became _"The Furies"_. Xena and Gabrielle had been back in Greece for barely 2 moons, and Xena was still suffering debilitation from ergotism, when they were recalled to Chin. (Ergot poisoning, caused by a fungus growing on rye because of wet weather, was relatively common in their time).

**Xena and Gabrielle's second trip to Chin (68 BC)**

(Most of 1 year travelling)

**"The Dragon and the Phoenix" (68 BC) **This scroll gave rise to the episodes, _"Purity"_, and _"Back in the Bottle"_. Recalled to Chin, Xena captures Ming Tsu's son, Ming Tien, the "Green Dragon", (age 22), and turns him over to the Laos, who execute him for breaking the peace with his black powder army. The restored peace of Chin is the reborn "Phoenix".

**"Giant Killer" (68 BC) **Written on the road, this scroll begins with a short history of giants, during which Gabrielle recounts a legend that became the episode, _"Giant Killer"_, and continues with an adventure that became _"A Day in the Life"_. It probably also inspired the anecdotal scene with Gabrielle and the blind cyclops that was inserted into the episode, _"Sins of the Past"_.

**The Birth of Eve (12th moon, 68 BC)**

(Xena is 29 and Gabrielle is 21)

**"The Blood Shamaness" (late 68 BC) **Immediately follows the soulmates' return from Chin. This scroll tells of Alti's reappearance after 8 years, again threatening the Amazon Nation. Still obsessed with forcing Xena to assist in her plans for destroying the Amazons, she attempted to steal Eve's soul during Xena's pregnancy. The episode, _"Them Bones, Them Bones"_ was based on this scroll. It was left to Gabrielle to actually defeat Alti, after Queen Melosa was mortally poisoned by the renegade, Valesca. At this time, Gabrielle was named a full sister and Amazon Warrior, by the newly crowned Queen Terreis.

**"The Dirty Half Dozen" (67 BC)**

**"Forgiven"**

**"In Sickness and In Hell" (66 BC)** Gabrielle writes of the plagues and diseases the soulmates had encountered during their travels. Among these we can recognize malaria, yellow fever, small pox, dysentery, leprosy, influenza, bubonic plague, tin and lead poisoning, acromegaly, chrondistrophic dwarfism, Siamese and parasite twinning, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, typhus, cholera, and several types of food poisoning. Note that the title of this scroll was borrowed for the title of an episode based on content from the scroll, "Is There A Physician In The Stockade?".

**"Past Imperfect" (66 BC) **

**Xena and Gabrielle's trip to Indus (65-63 BC)**

(Over 2 years, during which Carthage falls to a plague, probably Yersinia pestis)

**"Paradise Found" (65 BC) **Gabrielle and Xena learn yoga techniques and a new system of pressure point attacks from the Tibetan mystic and holy man, Ai-den. The techniques compliment the famous "nerve pinch" that Xena had learned years before in Chin. It is believed that these methods predate and predict the later Chinese system of fighting called the "Poison Hand".

**"Karma" (64 BC) **The events of this scroll, actually a travelogue of the journey to Indus and a record of the philosophies they encountered, became, after great embellishment, the episodes _"Devi"_, and _"Between the Lines"_. Xena and Gabrielle meet Eli and again defeat Alti, this time in spirit form.

**"The Way" (64-63 BC) **Xena is purified by her acceptance of the Way of the Warrior, under the guidance of a spiritual teacher in Indus. It is during their return to Greece that she is able to take possession of the Chakram of Light and combine it with the Chakram of Darkness. This material, much modified, is the basis for the episodes, _"The Way"_, and _"Chakram"_.

**The Middle Years (63-58 BC)**

(5 years of relative peace that began in war end in tragedy)

**"The Best Day" (Summer Solstice, 63 BC) **This scroll includes the material that became both _"A Good Day"_ and _"Amphipolis Under Siege"_. Xena engineers the destruction of Caesar and Pompey's eastern armies outside of Amphipolis. The combined Roman casualties are estimated at over 40,000. Xena had returned home with Gabrielle and 4 ½ year old Eve, hoping for a semi-retirement in which to raise her daughter.

**"The Play's the Thing" **A self-deprecatory piece by Gabrielle, telling of the fiasco arising from her attempt at theater production.

**"Crusader" (61-60 BC ?) **This scroll tells of the warrior, Najara, seducer of the Roman Governor of Pergamum. She had so bewitched the weak willed governor with her ambition and delusions of supernatural invincibility, that he had begun the secession of Pergamum from the Roman Empire. Her crusade was to supplant the Roman pantheon through forced conversion, and create an empire dedicated to an ancient and bloodthirsty monotheistic faith, the worship of Ba'al. It was her use of captured Greek sailors, (fishermen and traders from Thracian coastal villages in particular), as human sacrifices, which prompted the soulmates to become involved. Staying ahead of soldiers dispatched by Pompey the Magnus to depose the governor, Xena and Gabrielle track down and battle Najara. After finally dealing Najara an incapacitating wound, the soulmates left her in local custody for the arriving legions. Charged with sedition, piracy, and heresy, Najara was executed for her crimes following her trial and conviction by a Roman court in early 59 BC.

**The Birth of Hope (10th moon, 60 BC)**

(Gabrielle is 29 and Hope was not the rape-spawn of a demon or evil god)

**"Lifeblood" (60 BC) **Xena and Gabrielle return to the Amazon Village for the birth and christening of Gabrielle's daughter, Hope, who receives her Right of Caste. They find that Queen Ephiny had succeeded Queen Terreis in 62 BC.

**"Succession" (59 BC) **Xena and Gabrielle confront and kill Mavican, Callisto's would-be successor, sparring partner, and disciple, who had escaped from Shark Island in 60 BC after studying there under the "Warrior Queen" for 10 years. It should be noted that for several years, Gabrielle had been as deadly a fighter as Xena, and inflicted Mavican's fatal wound with her sai.

**Caesar's Kidnapping of Eve (58 BC)**

(Xena is 39 and Gabrielle is 30)

**"Endgame" (Vernal Equinox, 58 BC) **This scroll tells of Caesar's revenge. On his orders, Brutus attacks the Amazons, knowing Pompey is nearby. Queen Ephiny is killed, and Eve, (age 9), is kidnapped. In the power gulf, Xena takes temporary command of the Amazon army, slaughters Pompey's legions, and personally beheads him, believing that he, not Caesar, was responsible for Eve's abduction. At the same time, Gabrielle leads a war party to recover Ephiny's body and rescue Amazons taken prisoner by Brutus. She was almost successful in killing Brutus as well, a lost opportunity the soulmates would be thankful for years later on the Ides of March. Only weeks later, Caesar sends a gloating message explaining how Brutus' troops had dressed in Pompey's uniforms for the kidnapping, and that Xena's rage had removed his greatest rival for power in Rome.

**The Bloody Years (58-47 BC)**

(Most of these 12 years were spent trying to free Eve from Caesar)

It is during this time that Gabrielle trades her sais for a pair of Amazon short swords, the blades of which she has lightened by "ventilation", removing windows of metal to leave the blades "skeletonized". The resulting whistle when slicing through the air becomes a fearsome trademark of the "Amazon Bard".

**"One Against an Army" (58-47 BC) **Xena declares war on the Roman Empire with the objective of recovering her daughter from Caesar. Although this scroll contains the story of Xena's defense of a high pass, that battle was only one of many, fought over a dozen years, against the Roman army, not the Persians. Over the years, Xena was credited with causing destruction equivalent to over five Roman legions in Greece, two in Italia, one in Gallia, and one in Germania; including auxiliaries and mercenaries, a total of over 86,000 soldiers. This includes the Roman casualties of "Endgame", but not those of "The Best Day". _(The Battle of Thermopylae was fought in 480 BC, over 400 years before Xena's time)_.

**"Queen Marga" (58 BC) **Documents the short reign of the Amazon Queen Marga, and provided material that became _"Coming Home"_ and _"Dangerous Prey"_. Note that Prince Morloch was the leader of the hostile army, while Ares and the Erinyes never appear.

**"Queen Varia" (57-54 BC and 46 BC) **Documents the beginning of the reign of the hotheaded Amazon Queen Varia, and the 3-year war against Helicon. It provides material that became, _"To Helicon and Back",_ as well as relating Varia's later "Oath of Blood", the Amazon Nation's vendetta against Livia, that served as the background for the episode, _"Path of Vengeance"_, which occurred after the rescue of Eve.

_**Note 1: (52 BC) Callisto escapes from Shark Island Penal Colony and temporarily disappears. **At some point after this time, it is suspected that Callisto made her way to Asia Minor and took possession of the Chakram of Night, which she used in her attack on Xena in Rome. This weapon turned up millennia later in Ares' tomb and was seen there by Janice Covington and Melinda Pappas. It was the rumor of Callisto in Rome that had brought Xena and Gabrielle out of semi-retirement for their last adventure)._

**"The Abyss" (48 BC) **The events of this scroll were probably also dramatized to become _"The Price"_ and _"Daughter of Pomira"_, as well as the episode, _"The Abyss"_.

**The Rescue of Eve (46 BC)**

(Xena is 51, Gabrielle is 43, and Eve is 21)

**"The Eternal City" (46 BC) **Regarded by scholars as the continuation and culmination of the scroll, "One Against An Army", it contains the story of the rescue of Eve, now known as Livia. To free her, the soulmates infiltrated Caesar's Palace in Rome and arranged the decimation of three cohorts of Praetorians within the city. Xena and Gabrielle spent almost all of their remaining lives on the run, undoing Caesar's influence on Xena's daughter. By this time, Xena had been named First Enemy of the Imperium, with the price on her head growing to 6 million denarii.

**"The Ides of March" (44 BC) **Begun by Gabrielle in a Roman prison, and completed by an unknown author after the crucifixion. Xena was 53, Gabrielle was 45, Callisto was 46, and Caesar was 56, on the Ides of March, 44 BC. Xena and Gabrielle were executed on the same day as the assassination of their archenemy Gaius Julius Caesar. The unknown author attempts to claim that they all died within moments of each other, in different parts of the city of Rome. Only Callisto survived, and her fate is not recorded.

_**Note 2: Eve and Hope **both survived their mothers' deaths. Eve lived in Amphipolis while not on the road continuing Xena and Gabrielle's work. In 39 BC she was able to avenge herself by killing Brutus. She became a well-known warrior and hero, hunted by Rome, until she was granted amnesty and banished from Italia by Augustus Caesar, in 27 BC. In return, she foreswore carrying on her mother's war against the Empire. The agreement was one of mutual convenience, as she was 40 and had two children by that time, and Augustus was in the process of securing his rule. Unlike Xena, Eve lived to retire and raise her family at her grandmother's inn. Eve and Hope were never more than acquaintances, as Hope was only 2 when Eve was kidnapped, and 14 when she was freed. By that time, Livia/Eve was regarded as an enemy of the Amazon Nation. Hope exceeded Gabrielle's status as an Amazon Warrior, while living fulltime with her tribe. At the age of 18, she earned the grade of Master Warrior, upon achieving her 25th kill in battle. At the age of 19, Hope became War Queen of the Greek Amazons, following her challenge and defeat of Queen Varia on the summer solstice in 40 BC. Using that position to honor the relationship between her own mother and Eve's, she declined to prosecute Varia's "Oath of Blood", and the Nation's vendetta against Livia/Eve was laid to rest. Almost nothing further is known about her._

_**Note 3: Deadly Xena and Gabrielle** were both hunted by Rome, but because of the personal enmity between Xena and Caesar, it was always the Warrior Princess for whom the Empire reserved its greatest hatred. Over the years, (with Gabrielle's help), Xena was involved in the deaths of something in the neighborhood of 156,000 enemy troops, 40,000 in _"The Best Day",_ 86,000 during _"One Against an Army",_ and 30,000 in Chin, primarily in _"The Dragon and the Phoenix"._ Figures on deaths during her years as a warlord are sketchy, however best estimates place the total at something in the neighborhood of 12,000 to 15,000. A conservative total would count 170,000 dead over the course of her career. For purposes of comparison, Hannibal Barca is credited with the destruction of about 85,000 legionnaires and allies in three major battles, (Trebbia River, Lake Trasimeno, and the Plain of Cannae), within three years. In the American Civil War, about 185,000 men were killed in action or died of wounds. Another 186,000 died of diseases associated with the war. Civilian casualties are unrecorded. _

**April 27, 2000 (AD) **Cloned Xena and Gabrielle escape from the clandestine lab of Alexis Los Alamos, (Alti), in City of Industry, California.

**September 21, 2000 (AD) **Dr.Janice Covington, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Archeology at the University of S.C. passes away after a third stroke. Ray, her colleague and one-time graduate teaching assistant had introduced the soulmates to her on June 2. She had used her old contacts in the underworld to provide personal identities for the clones, who settle down with her in Columbia S.C., in the old Pappas family house. Janice makes Serena Pappas and Gabriella Covington her heirs, and the inheritors of the Pappas estate. The clones learn the truth of their origin.

**April 30, 2001 (AD) **The cloned soulmates travel to New Zealand and confront Lucy, Renee, and Rob on the set of the final episode of the TV show, Xena Warrior Princess. They learn the secret of how the show was conceived and confirm their suspicions that an old influence is again active in the modern world. (End of Part 1)

**June 1, 2001 (AD) **The clones open the Columbia School of Martial Science. Their first students are the Columbia, S.C. police officers, Marcus Lewis and Alexander Williams.

**September 13, 2001 (AD) **Gabrielle wins the Women's Division of the 23rd National Open Full Contact Martial Arts Championships, to honor the soulmates' fallen student, Marcus Lewis, who was killed in a hijacked plane on Sept. 11, in Stony Creek Township, Pennsylvania. On the same day, Xena foils a bio-terrorist hostage situation in Quantico, Va., which initiates the clones' contact with the FBI's elite Hostage Rescue Team.

**September 16 to October 14, 2001 (AD)** The soulmates serve as guest instructors in unarmed combat to the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, at the FBI compound in the Quantico Marine Base, Quantico, Virginia. They have also drawn the interest of a covert government agency, the shadow organization, Omega Sector. A team led by agent Harry Tasker investigates them, while at the same time forestalling investigation by other government intelligence agencies.

**November 2, 2001 (AD) **The Columbia School of Martial Science is attacked by clones of Callisto and her disciple, Mavican. Those clones are defeated by Xena and Gabrielle and then tracked when they flee by agents of Omega Sector, who subsequently contact the soulmates about a covert mission.

**November 7, 2001 (AD) **The clones are recruited by Harry Tasker to join in a mission to neutralize a secret DOE cloning facility near Atlanta, Georgia. During that mission the Destroyer of Nations is reborn. (End of Part 2)

**November 8, 2001 (AD) **The clone of Elainis of Mycenae attacks the Columbia School of Martial Science. Because of that battle's outcome, the Destroyer of Nations accepts the Blessing of the God of War and embraces her ancient heritage. Serena Pappas disappears and the Pappas estate is taken over by Artiphys International, a subsidiary of the DON GROUP, Inc., an investment consortium ultimately headed by Kori Polemos.

**November 10, 2001 (AD) **The Destroyer of Nations claims the Chakram of Day.

**March 28, 2002 (AD) **Mass cloning of Xena's army begins in two locations. The initial work had already been completed over the previous three months.

**June 1, 2002 (AD) **During the first successful flight test of a scramjet engine in Woomera, S. Australia, a speed of Mach 8.6 is achieved.

**September 11, 2002 (AD) **Athena opens her war by proxy. The United States attacks Iraq and Afghanistan with airstrikes, which include the use of nuclear weapons. Days earlier, a covert war had begun using engineered bioweapons to cause epidemics in North Korea and the Sudan. The combined death toll eventually tops 3 ½ million.

**September 12, 2002 (AD) **The Destroyer of Nations is successful in enlisting the leading theoretical researcher in nanotechnology, and isolates him with a support team at her lab in Yokohama. The DON GROUP has invested extensively in Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, providing the Destroyer with a manufacturing base and technological assets in Japan.

**December 2003 (AD) **Athena's forces release an engineered plague in Beijing. The death toll eventually climbs to 27.5 million.

**April 1, 2004 (AD) **Two genetically enhanced clones mature to the point that they are able to escape the primary lab site and join the Destroyer of Nations.

**January 5, 2005 (AD) **As expected, Athena destroys Xena's primary cloning site.

**March 2, 2005 (AD) **The refitted Miss Artiphys puts to sea.

**July 6, 2005 (AD) **The _chiliarchoi_ join the Destroyer of Nations.

**October 14, 2005 (AD) **The Argo puts to sea.

**December 2005 (AD) **Athena's forces release an engineered plague in Europe.

**December 6, 2005 (AD) **The _strategos_ opens her war with the release of plagues.

**December 18, 2005 (AD) **Neutralization of the US and Russian North Atlantic Fleets.

**December 30, 2005 (AD) **Destruction of USAMRIID and the Hanford, Wa. site.

**January 1, 2006 (AD) **New Years Day attacks destroy the Mediterranean cities of Athens, Rome, Tel Aviv, and Alexandria.

**January 2, 2006 (AD) **Destruction of London,Paris, Brussels, and Berlin with Mach 8 cruise missiles.

**January 17, 2006 (AD) **The Persian Gulf oil reserves are struck and neutralized.

**January 18, 2006 (AD) **The "SecondPhase" is complete and a migration begins.

**March 2, 2006 (AD) **The Destroyer of Nations' army emerges from the mirror site.

**April 12, 2006 (AD) **The Destroyer of Nations lands her army at Kavala in Macedonia.

**April 22, 2006 (AD) **The Destroyer of Nations successfully defeats Athena's armies in a three pronged preemptive counterattack.

**May 5-7, 2006 (AD) **The Destroyer drives Athena's army from their camp in Macedonia.

**May 15, 2006 (AD) **The Destroyer of Nations draws Athena's army into battle at her selected location in the Strymon Vale. She defeats them decisively but refuses their surrender, preferring to leave them demoralized.

**May 22, 2006 (AD) **The Destroyer of Nations annihilates Athena's army in a final battle and captures the Goddess of Wisdom. She becomes the Conqueror, but circumstances cause her to postpone completing her subjugation of the modern world.

**June 6, 2006 (AD) **The Conqueror abdicates her position and leaves the modern world.

****

_**Appendix 2**_

**A Brief Glossary of Greek Military Terms**

**Aspis** A shield.

**Chiliarchia **A unit of one thousand troops.

**Chiliarchos** A commander of a thousand.

**Daemons **In Greek and Roman mythology, the daemons (or genii) were an order of invisible beings. The Greeks believed them to be inferior deities and that Zeus assigned one daemon to each man and woman at his birth, to attend, protect and guide him or her and at his or her death dying with him or her. They were nameless, and like the multitude of mankind, innumerable. Some of them acted as personal attendants to deities of a higher order, and in that case were represented under particular forms, and enjoyed distinctive names, while others were believed to watch over particular districts, towns or nations. The Romans believed them to be intermediate beings linking mankind with the gods. _(This definition from an online dictionary but I can't remember which one...sorry)._

**Ektaxis **Battle order, or troop formation.

**Epilektos** An elite soldier.

**Euzonos** A light infantryman. (Also: Psilos)

**Gorytos **A quiver.

**Hekatontarches **A commander of a hundred.

**Hekatontarchia **A unit of one hundred troops.

**Hippikon **Cavalry

**Hoplites **Heavy infantry troops, typically armed with spear, shield, sword, and dagger.

**Katalepsis **Battle mania, battle madness, or hysteria.

**Kataphractes **Body armor, particularly mail or scale.

**Kataskopos **A scout.

**Kranos** A helmet.

**Machaira **A sword. (Also: Spathe, Xiphos)

**Machairophoros **A swordsman.

**Pelekus **A battle-axe, usually a double-axe with two blades.

**Peltastès** A skirmisher equipped with a light shield.

**Pezos** An infantryman.

**Phrouros** A guard.

**Poliorketès** A besieger.

**Poliorkia** A siege.

**Praipositos** A commander (generic).

**Psilos **A light infantryman. (Also: Euzonos)

**Spathe** A sword. (Also Machaira, Xiphos)

**Spathe makra** A longsword

**Strategos** A commander of an army, a general.

**Strategos Hypatos** The supreme commander of a nation's or confederation's armies.

**Strati** An army (generic).

**Synedrion **A military council.

**Thoorakitès** A skirmisher equipped with body armor.

**Toxotès** An archer.

**Toxon **A bow.

**Xiphidion** A short sword or dagger.

**Xiphos **A sword. (Also: Machaira, Spathe)

66


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